A very useful video reference, called Seasonal changes over a year in 60 seconds. From the site, “Eirik Solheim has been diligently recording video clips of the same spot from his balcony that overlooks a beautiful park in Oslo, Norway. He would shoot 30-second videos once every week throughout the year, thus capturing all the four seasons, and then compiled all these clips into a single time-lapse video. Thanks Steve.” Site: http://www.labnol.org/internet/all-seasons-time-lapse-video/12329/

This video will help me to study the season change and tree growing.

Although this is using photographs to make of an oak tree as it changes during a year, but it still very useful.

I found one book: The Growing Tree by Brayton Fuller Wilson, which is the book anly sis the detail of how tree growing and developing. I am still reading this book and improving my understanding the behind logic tree growth.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=fRMOORqbD7kC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=tree+growing&ots=XrbeZehNo5&sig=7Do_GjPKSkG-AMwu2zpGp5DrIH4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Most of the time is spending  on visual research:

Get  3 books:

Forest:

Tree 1(procedural)

Tree 2(procedural)

Tree 3(procedural)

Brush 1(procedural)

Brush 2(procedural)

Grass 1

Grass 2

Ivy

Stone

Water

Level:

Main temple

Inside explanation hall

The crystal lamp

The windmill

The platform

Stander

Bridge

Creaked stander

Crystal

Control tower

Outsider of island

Particle effects:

Falling leaves spring summer

Falling leaves fall

Snow

Incest

The game industry has already started using procedural content generation idea in some games, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Hellgate: London. In most games’ worlds, though, players still face stable environments. () MMO players require more real time effects, but the level designers haven’t conceded: The procedural evolution, the term developed from procedural generation, creates an artificial evolution by computer algorithm.

A procedural evolution of a forest system is the first step of next generation environment design. Before that, level designers tried different ways to make the game levels meaningful and effective.() In the persistent game world, the system could fit the most essential design factors () and increase the effectiveness of using the game level.

The procedural evolution of a forest system can be developed through studying the basic algorithm of natural forests in the real world. () Using the algorithm to improvement the forest system in the real game engine is the main goal of my studies. There are two questions: First, is the forest system suit for all type of game or just works well in MMO levels? Second, is it possible to use UDK, a common game level design tool, to create real time procedural evolution?

1) Resume

2) Thesis statement and abstract

3) Bibliography

4) Annotated Bibliography

5) Literature Review

7) Main discussion outline

8 ) Brain storming Map

Also, Working on visual
some sketchs:

Kelly,George and  McCabe, Hugh,  “A Survey of Procedural Techniques for City Generation”, Institute of Technology, Psu.edu. Web. 02 Oct. 2011

“This article study the main body of existing research into procedural city generation and provide an overview of their implementations and a critique of their functionality and results. Finally the author present areas in which further research into the generation of cities is required and outline our research goals for city generation.” (1) The techniques the author discussed in the article is almost same as the technique general using in forest generation area. It could say this article is very relate to the method I will talk about in my paper.

Ebert,David S. & Musgrave, F.Kenton, etc.   Texturing & Modeling : A Procedural Approach  2003, Elsevier Science, Print.

“This book imparts a working knowledge of procedural approaches in texturing, modeling, shading and animation and demonstrates their use in high-quality offline and real-time applications. These include two-dimensional and solid texturing hypertextures, volume density functions and fractals.”(Preface XX) This book is still about procedural generation but not procedural evolution idea of texturing and modeling. But the study method is what I can learn and use in my thesis and system.

A nice meeting with Ming Tang

We discussed my thesis . Prof. Ming gave me the feedback about my thesis statement, the research I’ve done. Also, he introduced a visual effect prof.  Malcolm Allan Kesson who is the master of mel stricpt. Also there are two links he gave me:

www.procedural.com
The soft/plug-in base on Houdini to procedural generated city.

www.grasshopper3d.com/group/galapagos
Open-source soft/plug-in to procedural generated buildings.

Smelik, R.M.,  Tutenel,T.,  de Kraker,K.J., and Bidarra, R.  “A Proposal for a Procedural Terrain Modelling Framework” EGVE Symposium (2008), Web. 29 Sep. 2011.

Manual game content creation is an increasingly laborious task; with each advance in graphics hardware, a higher level of fidelity and detail is achievable and, therefore, expected. Although numerous automatic (e.g. procedural) content generation algorithms and techniques have been developed over the years, their application in both games and simulations is not widespread. What lacks is a unifying modeling framework that combines these techniques in a usable manner. We propose to develop a new, high-level framework for automatic generation of virtual worlds (e.g. game levels, simulation terrain) that requires intuitive user input and results in a rich 3D terrain model.

Decaudin, Philippe and Neyret, Fabrice,  “Rendering Forest Scenes in Real-Time”, 2004

“Forests are crucial for scene realism in applications such as fight simulators. This paper proposes a new representation allowing for the real-time rendering of realistic forests covering an arbitrary terrain. It lets us produce dense forests corresponding to continuous non-repetitive fields made of thousands of trees with full parallax.Dynamic lighting and shadowing are beyond the scope of this paper. On the other hand, we require no advanced graphics feature except 3D textures and decent fill and vertex transform rates. However we can take advantage of vertex shaders so that the slicing of the volumetric texture is entirely done on the GPU.” This article is actually one of the early one to discuss render the forest in real time. although, because of isucial for scene realism in applications such as fight simulators. This paper proposes a new representation allowing for the real-time rendering of realistic forests covering an arbitrary terrain. It lets us produce dense forests corresponding to continuous non-repetitive fields made of thousands of trees with full parallax.Dynamic lighting and shadowing are beyond the scope of this paper. On the other hand, we require no advanced graphics feature except 3D textures and decent fill and vertex transform rates. However we can take advantage of vertex shaders so that the slicing of the volumetric texture is entirely done on the GPU.”

This article is actually one of the early papers to discuss rendering the forest in real time. Although the way is quite old. but they write about the previous way to make real time trees. That part could be a very useful source in the discussion of previous different ways to make  the forest in game. Also, in the conclusion part, the way to calculating how many menory will be used in GPU give me a great inspiration about decide if my  procedural evoluting forest system can work or not for the next-geo MMOs.

Truelsen, René and Bonding, Morten, “Visualizing procedurally generated trees in real time using multiple levels of detail” 2008

“Procedural methods for tree growth and simulation can achieve much greater realism and variation than static models. L-systems is a procedural method which can produce almost any type of structure, organism or fractal but can be very complex depending on the level of realism. Simple Lsystems, however, are easily implemented, can be run in real time, and are commonly used and well documented.”
This article explain how the easy L-system procedural creation of forest could work in the real time engine.  The results and evaluation part will help me to finish my thesis.  Procedural evoluting idea is the things they didn’t explore, and interactive with player is not even mentioned in the paper. So, that means my thesis could go a step further in the procedural forest system. Although, I will more focus on how player see the forest sence as one entire piece.

Task list:

Working on make a conclution of Studio1 class’s research and clear my mind.These parts will be showing in the doc of review, and most of them are direct relate to the thesis development.

Create a brain map in my brain.

1)Contents

2) Resume

3)thesis statement and abstract

4)Bibliography

5)Annotated Bibliography

6)Literature Review

7)Methodolog

8)Main discussion outline

9)Brain storming Map

10)Some visual

11)Conclusion

12)Transtipte