Reading Material.
by James Dunlap · in Technical Issues · 12/05/2007 (4:25 am) · 3 replies
Greetings,
I do fair amount of reading/poking around for tid bits of information (like we all do). However, don't have any sort of formal education in game engine/graphics rendering technology. So oft times I feel that I am missing out on understanding the big picture or at least some of the foundations.
So what I'm asking is for and recommendations resources/reading material that will help me get a bigger understanding of the technology involved. I'm not specifically asking for books but I am looking for a couple good ones (I have already been through the Torque specific books).
Some of the area's I've been researching of late are BSP and poly soup (coming up empty handed on this one)
Any suggestions/nudges in the correct direction would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
James -
I do fair amount of reading/poking around for tid bits of information (like we all do). However, don't have any sort of formal education in game engine/graphics rendering technology. So oft times I feel that I am missing out on understanding the big picture or at least some of the foundations.
So what I'm asking is for and recommendations resources/reading material that will help me get a bigger understanding of the technology involved. I'm not specifically asking for books but I am looking for a couple good ones (I have already been through the Torque specific books).
Some of the area's I've been researching of late are BSP and poly soup (coming up empty handed on this one)
Any suggestions/nudges in the correct direction would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
James -
About the author
#2
12/05/2007 (3:58 pm)
David, thank you for the information. I understand the "concept" behind poly-soup. However, in the context of implementing it into an engine it seems to me that its something more substantial than a style of modeling. I suppose my real question about it is what makes it different than the current poly soup formats such as .dts? Does poly soup have more reliable collisions? Does it have the same lighting limitations as .dts? I apologize about the questions if the answers seem apparent to you but I'd dearly love to study these answers for myself. I just haven't the foggiest where they are. 
#3
Collisions in terms of "polysoup collisions" just checks to see if you are touching a polygon. If so, then you are colliding. It doesn't matter what format the polygons come in so much as that the engine knows that there are polygons there and can determine whether you are touching them.
You would have to write a lighting model that worked with polygonal elements rather than collision boxes and then optimize it. Most studies of 3D rendering and shadows will cover polygonal shadow generation. Most of those studies are not intended for realtime usage and are theoretical and algorithmic in practice. But they are the basis for most of the optimizations for realtime rendering as well. But most books on 3D lighting algorithms will provide the base knowledge you are asking. Most are also quite math heavy.
12/05/2007 (4:11 pm)
DTS is a specifically ordered type of polysoup format. Because of the consistency in the format, you could develop algorithms for occlusion and such for rendering zones and the like. The same could be said of becoming intimate with any polysoup format.Collisions in terms of "polysoup collisions" just checks to see if you are touching a polygon. If so, then you are colliding. It doesn't matter what format the polygons come in so much as that the engine knows that there are polygons there and can determine whether you are touching them.
You would have to write a lighting model that worked with polygonal elements rather than collision boxes and then optimize it. Most studies of 3D rendering and shadows will cover polygonal shadow generation. Most of those studies are not intended for realtime usage and are theoretical and algorithmic in practice. But they are the basis for most of the optimizations for realtime rendering as well. But most books on 3D lighting algorithms will provide the base knowledge you are asking. Most are also quite math heavy.
Community Manager David Montgomery-Blake
Polysoup is really just a term for being able to have arbitrary polygons in your meshes. It allows artists to create very cool looking models, but it also have the problem of not being optimized according to a specific, easy-to-traverse algorithm. Most 3D modeling software such as Max, Maya, etc are "polysoup."
EDIT: Fixed tags