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11:26am - I spent a lot of yesterday doing research and I found this great set of notes on Spore's development. http://www.chrishecker.com/My_liner_notes_for_spore
It doesn't just cover the tech they used but also some of the rationales they had for this or that. For example, there was a high pressure for them to make it so that the creature was skinned in real time, so they had to go as simple as they could.
Well we'll see how I do it myself when I get into it. I still have to figure out how to make Metaballs, and how they work.
3:42pm - Well that was a long time between updates! I did some research that didn't go anywhere and laid down for a while. Now I'm back! I'm looking for information on 3D Metaballs, how they work and how to program them, but everything I'm finding is either how to use them in a 3D modelling studio like Blender or Maya or it's dealing with 2D metaballs.
4:07pm - Just read http://transvoxel.org/ and it's pretty interesting. The Marching Cubes algorithm has come up a lot in my research and this seems to be a LOD fix for that.
4:38pm - This old, nearly lost article describes Metaballs in language I can understand. https://web.archive.org/web/20141103023010/http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/modeling/metaballs/metaballs.htm
I'm starting to wonder if Metaballs or Marching Cubes would be better for this. From what I read earlier in the article on Spore, they didn't use Marching Cubes because the algorithm was patented back then, but the patent ran out just as Spore was releasing. They weren't sure if it would've been faster or not because they didn't test it.
Maybe I should be looking at Marching Cubes rather than Metaballs, especially if I'm generating a model made of many spheres first and revealing it through Marching Cubes instead of revealing several metaballs one after the other... Though maybe I'm misunderstanding part of the Metaball algorithm, since I'm not sure how it handles multiples and their famous conjoinment yet. Though I have an idea.
4:45pm - Oh, this wikipedia article on Marching Cubes immediately conjoins the two subjects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
6:27pm - There's been a lot of time between my posts today! Mostly I ate some Quiche and did more research, but I'm getting tired so I'm going to wrap up for now.
It doesn't just cover the tech they used but also some of the rationales they had for this or that. For example, there was a high pressure for them to make it so that the creature was skinned in real time, so they had to go as simple as they could.
Well we'll see how I do it myself when I get into it. I still have to figure out how to make Metaballs, and how they work.
3:42pm - Well that was a long time between updates! I did some research that didn't go anywhere and laid down for a while. Now I'm back! I'm looking for information on 3D Metaballs, how they work and how to program them, but everything I'm finding is either how to use them in a 3D modelling studio like Blender or Maya or it's dealing with 2D metaballs.
4:07pm - Just read http://transvoxel.org/ and it's pretty interesting. The Marching Cubes algorithm has come up a lot in my research and this seems to be a LOD fix for that.
4:38pm - This old, nearly lost article describes Metaballs in language I can understand. https://web.archive.org/web/20141103023010/http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/modeling/metaballs/metaballs.htm
I'm starting to wonder if Metaballs or Marching Cubes would be better for this. From what I read earlier in the article on Spore, they didn't use Marching Cubes because the algorithm was patented back then, but the patent ran out just as Spore was releasing. They weren't sure if it would've been faster or not because they didn't test it.
Maybe I should be looking at Marching Cubes rather than Metaballs, especially if I'm generating a model made of many spheres first and revealing it through Marching Cubes instead of revealing several metaballs one after the other... Though maybe I'm misunderstanding part of the Metaball algorithm, since I'm not sure how it handles multiples and their famous conjoinment yet. Though I have an idea.
4:45pm - Oh, this wikipedia article on Marching Cubes immediately conjoins the two subjects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
6:27pm - There's been a lot of time between my posts today! Mostly I ate some Quiche and did more research, but I'm getting tired so I'm going to wrap up for now.
