Procedural Rendering on Playstation 2

Source: www.research.scea.com
Topic: Playstation 2

Short Desciption:
investigation of procedural rendering and start focussing on how to implement this process more efficiently on the Playstation 2. using the EECore ...

 

Content Inside:
Procedural Rendering on Playstation 2Page 1Public VersionCopyright SCEA March 20011Procedural Rendering on Playstation2Robin GreenR&D ProgrammerSony Computer Entertainment AmericaThis paper describes the design and coding of a program to generate instances of a procedural Lifeform based on the work ofWilliam Latham in the late 1980s. The sneaky thing is that this tutorial is not really about procedural rendering its moreabout the realworld experience of designing and writing programs on PS2.Why choose a procedural model? Nearly all of the early example code that ships with the T10000 development kit is somethingalong the lines of send this magic lump of precalculated data at this magic bit of VU code. It does show off the speed of themachine and shows that techniques are possible but its not very useful if you want to learn how to produce your own code. Bychoosing a procedural model to program there are several benefits:1.Very little can be precalculated. The program has to explicitly build up all the data structures allowingmore insights into how things are put together.2.It can generate a lot of polygons quickly. Procedural models are scalable to the point where they canswamp even the fastest graphics system.3.Its more interesting than yet another Fractal Landscape or Particle System. I just wanted to be a littledifferent. The algorithm is only marginally more complex than a particle system with emitters.4.The algorithm has many ways it can be parallelized. The algorithm has some interesting properties thatcould allow large parts of it to be run on a VU taking just the numerical description of a creature as inputsand generating the polygons directly. I have only space to explore one way of producing the models butthere are several other equally good separation points.5.Its been over ten years. I thought it would be fun to try an old technique with modern hardware.Evolutionary Art was once a painstaking time consuming search through the genome space previewinga ...