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June 19, 2005

I finally found the time (or, decided to take the time) to update this site with my final projects from my last semester at DigiPen! That's right, my time at DigiPen is over, and I'm now an actual paid professional in the video game industry! My time and investment paid off, because I'm having a blast working at my current employer, Snowblind Studios. After this final update, I'll probably section off my site into two sections, one where I'll archive all of my DigiPen material, and one for current updates. I realize I still have some unfinished tutorials in the queue, and I also would like to get to those sometime in the near future. Feel free to shoot me an email if you're looking for more information on a topic I've promised to cover.

January 16, 2005

It's a new year and a new semester. I've added a section for my newest game project, Project: Solar, and I'll be posting demos, screen shots, and documents as the semester progresses. Check back often for the most recent version (and recognize that it's a work in progress! :).

December 4, 2004

Gave a minor face lift to the site. I've been pretty swamped with school, but I hope to be able to get some more tutorials up over the winter break. In addition, I'll be putting up my most recent projects...

August 27, 2004

Been experimenting with shadows. This initially led me down the road of converting all my rendering code to OpenGL, which was very informative, but ultimately I've come back to DirectX (mostly because my graphics card supports pixel shaders for DX, but not fragment shaders in GL; go figure!). In any case, I've finally succeeded in getting shadow mapping off the ground, though due to the aliasing for unfavorable lighting circumstances, I'll be messing around with techniques to combat that (Perspective Shadow Maps, Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps, and Trapezoidal Shadow Maps). Look for my notes on this in future tutorials.

Also been playing with terrain a bit. This month saw the creation of a simple utility for converting height maps to terrain geometry, as well as some texture blending for the terrain in the pixel shader using terrain height as the interpolating factor.

July 29, 2004

Summer semester comes to a close, and I've added the final two projects. One is an extension to the Ray Tracer, where I've added Ray-Torus intersections (check out the document deriving it) as well as two different depth-of-field models. The other project demonstrates fun with Newton's linear and angular dynamics laws, as applied to a bunch of blocks connected by a linear spring-damper system.

July 18, 2004

Just came across two sites today, both of which are great. Real Time Computer Graphics offers a bunch of short, sweet, and concise tutorials on some of the more bleeding-edge technologies, while the website of Charles Bloom offers many articles in a similar vein but with a bunch of great rants thrown in.

July 17, 2004

Finally got this site up and running. I'm finishing up my summer semester at DigiPen right now, taking cs400 and cs460. I took a break from the C++ and learned enough PHP and HTML over the past few days to do this site, but I'll have to get back to the C++ soon. I'm hoping to get to the tutorials in August. Stay tuned for the next game project, which will be building off the technology in the Articulated Model Viewer. The game will be done around next April. As of yet, the exact nature of the game is still unknown...