Out Fishing

Micael — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:28:13 +0000

I spent the Saturday with my brother at one of our favorite fishing spots. The lake is called Holmesjön, and can be found about twenty kilometres from Gothenburg.

Well, I got lucky and caught myself two decently sized brown trout. Here’s a few pictures from the trip:

Trying, but not there yet.

Micael — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:07:28 +0000

I am still experimenting with HDR pictures, and have started to combine those experiments with panorama pictures. Well, I am getting there, but I’m not really there yet in question of quality… For example, the image below is an example of where I am right now. And there is a lot of errors in the image, both in the merging of HDR, and in teh merging of panorama. But I am getting there, and sometime in the future, I will most likely have a picture I am happy with.

The image is scaled down, click on the image to get a full size image (very large).

Marching cubes

Micael — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:49:42 +0000

Implemented an algorithm that is called “Marching cubes” to triangulate the fractal data generated by my fractal caverns projekt. The result is shown below. A bit hard to get the idea of how it will look like when it is finished, but you might get the idea.

I am not entirely happy with the normals, and there is a few details in the mesh that looks like bugs in the algorithm… Will have to look at that…

Fractal caverns

Micael — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:49:11 +0000

I was following how another user of the forum www.leetdev.com was writing routines to create mazes, and I got the idea to try to do it in 3D. However, I wanted to have a bit more organic feeling to the world that was to be created, so I decided to base my coding around libnoise using coherent noise functions in 3D. The idea was to build a voxel cube from coherent noise, and then hollow out the cube by removing the voxels that had a value less than a certain threshold value. The hollow spaces that was left in the voxel cube, could then be vectorized into triangles.

That was the idea, and I am not finished working on it yet. The results so far, can be best shown as:

This is a screenshot of the voxel cube being created:

And this screenshot is from where the voxel cube is almost finished:

And this screenshot shows the vertices left from the hollowing of the cube. These vertices will be used for creating the triangle mesh that I will use to render a world with:

The voxel cube have been calculated in such way, that it is seamless in all axises. Whish means that if you would place the same cube side by side in all directions, they would pattern match perfectly.

I cant wait until I have finished this code, and it is possible to fly though a nicely textured cave.

Breaking the law

Micael — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:50:08 +0000

As I wrote in a post a couple of days ago, I recently bought myself a Canon 450D, and have been experimenting with snapping HDR pictures.

For those of you that don’t know what HDR is: HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range”, and in plain English, it is simply put a picture with more color and luminance than can fit into a normal picture (like jpeg). This is easily seen in many pictures where details in the shadow simply becomes black, and the clouds and sky becomes all white. That is because the range for the color values in the image couldn’t fir the higher or lower range that the shadows and sky had. To overcome this, there is on some cameras a special progra, that allowes you to snap three or more pictures in a row and with different exposure times. Then by using a specialized software on a computer, the pictures can be merged together and the information from the different exposures can be calculated into one single image containing a much larger range than any of the single images.

So, I have been playing around with HDR pictures, and tonight I was out trying to photograph the nearby trainyard. I thought it would be interesting to see how a dark trainyard lit by electric light would be in HDR.

So after the sun had set, I went down to the trainyard. And I got there, mounted the camera on the tripod… Took two pictures… And then the guards arrived…

Apparently, I was trespassing… Like I didn’t know… And the guards politely told me, that they had the rights to arrest me, but that they thought that it would be easier if I just left instead.

So I left, and was happy enough that I got two pictures before the guards discovered me. (I can always go back another day)

Here are the two images I snapped:

I think I will start a Flickr account soon, where I can put my fullsize images…

Last Day Dream

Micael — Sun, 17 May 2009 07:27:06 +0000

Just brilliant:

Last Day Dream from torbjon on Vimeo.

Those Japs…

Micael — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:39:38 +0000

The Japanese are just getting weirder by the day… This is a video lecture about how to say “My stommach hurts” in Japanese:

HDR experiments

Micael — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:16:06 +0000

I bought a Canon 450D a couple of days ago, and have done some experimenting with HDR photos. Below is two pictures, the top one is a normal shot, and the one below is a tonemapped HDR representation of three merged shots with different exposures.
I didn’t use a tripod, which would have made the shot better, but you can see the difference in quality anyways.

What now?

Micael — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:07:21 +0000

I am really worthless at blogging… So many things going on all the time that I simply haven’t got any time to blog about them.
I am actually writing this while doing some laundry.

The main reason for writing this post, is to declare for those who want to know, that in the near future, a new forum will open at www.leetdev.com, and it will most likely be an invite only forum for professional multimedia developers.
I am configuring the forum right now, and will keep doing so for some time. But I will post the opening of it here.
If you feel that you are a professional multimedia developer and want to have access to such a forum, then please mail me at micael@hildenborg.com

With multimedia developer, I mean everyone that is in some way involved in making any kind of entertainment media or the software involved making that media.
Coders, graphic artists, managers etc. etc. Everyone is welcome as long as you have actually made something.
In other words: wannabees can go to another forum, I aim to have the topics on a higher level.

Two busy weeks

Micael — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:40:11 +0000

Well, I intended to post more often, and I still intend to do so… Just bare with me, so I can get up to speed again.
Last week was a pain! Lots of work, and then the kids demanded a lot of time from me. I really felt the nerves beginning to pop out to the wrong side of the skin before the week ended… And busy has pretty much been the default situation for me the last couple of weeks. To give you an idea of what kind of busy I’m talking about: I have not been able to do the dishes for two weeks. At the moment, the kitchen is full of dirty plates and glasses, and I have been eating junk food the last week as I havn’t had time to clean the pots and pans needed to make food… The apartment looks like some serious disaster happened there…
And this week, I realized that I had some time availible to either clean up the apartment, or to fix my car (yes, it’s a Volvo) that has been broken for two months. Well, as I really needed the car for this weekend, I simply had to get my hands dirty and fix the car… Thank god the problem was easy to fix, I just needed to pull out the generator and take it apart and clean it up. There was simply some dirt and oxidation that needed to be removed, and now everything works perfect again.
So this means that I can spend my day cleaning up my apartment tomorrow.
And maybe, just maybe I will get some time left to go to the sea and try to catch some trout…
And if I am really lucky, I will even get some time to spend on my ClipFX project. It is a general FX library that makes it possible to quickly make nice looking smooth flowing UI for games. It will work on Mac, Windows, PPC and iPhone. It could probably quite easily be ported to the popular games consoles as well. But that’s not my main market.