CS 4306 - Senior Design Quarter 1, Spring 1998
Project: Virtual Midtown Graphics Engine

Introduction
   Our second quarter's work on the Virtual Midtown Graphics Engine has extended our knowledge of 3-D graphics and the way computers manipulate and display them. We have progressed from the humble beginnings of a small program which would only display a wireframe cube and ended with a quality 3-D graphics viewer which seems to perform all of the functions SVE used in our original test. And does it faster. We have written the optimization portions of our renderer, and our expectations of greater rendering speed were confirmed. The source code for the Virtual Midtown project is located in the directory /users/projects/class/vrmidtown/vrmidtown. Our graphics code is in the client/viewer directory there.

Accomplishments:

• Mouse and keyboard-driven movement in a 3-D space.
• Viewer program compiles and runs under Windows 95, 98, and NT, SGI Irix, and Linux as long as glut libraries are installed.
• Smooth and faceted shading of Alias models.
• OpenGL "material" definitions for surface color and lighting characteristics.
• Dynamic loading of models.
• Culling of back-facing polygons.
• Static world and model lighting.
• Implementation of world metafiles to define the virtual world.
• Completion of virtually all texture mapping support.
• Optimization of rendering pipeline.
• Culling of out-of-view polygons before the rendering pipeline.
• Level of detail via bounding box substitution for agents.
• Improve the compilation and portability by standardizing makefiles and removing 64-bit library calls.

To Do:

• Fine-tune mouse movement.
• Lighting controls.
• Polygon texture-mapping final implementation.
• Mip-mapping
• Track down error which keeps crashing Irix 6.2 and earlier.

Detailed Documentation:

• Introduction
• Functionality
• Implementation
• Future Work

Warning: On SGI machines, make sure that your X server is set to TrueColor and 24-bit depth. The switches are "-class TrueColor -depth 24" At Ga. Tech, only O2's and Indigo's running Irix 6.3 or later seem to have this enabled.