I've messed around with GPU programming before, but not too much.
I have some experience setting up and running a Cg shader. I went
all out on this project though, at least for my skill level. Here
we have:
- a toon-shaded cow
- a procedurally textured cube
- a shader animated water mesh affecting the orientation and
position of the cow and brick
- cube-map environment mapping
This was a fun project to work on. I took some of my friends code
to load in OBJ models and added some hooks to load in color and normal
maps. The water behaviour didn't turn out as well as I had hoped
it would have.
I saw a paper from ATI and was inspired to work on depth of
field. I felt that this was going to be super cool. It
works, but the one thing I didn't get around to finishing was adding
camera based eye-tracking. If I had that working then the focal
distance was going to be determined by where your eye was looking, not
the center of the screen.
The final in the course was to write some kind of tutorial on how to do
"something" using the GPU. After looking at a Gamasutra article
on the Tron 2.0 glow effect, I felt I had to try to do the same
thing. I wanted to do some kind of neon sign effect and have a
billboard hovering high above the clouds in some futuristic
manner.
