[PROCEDURAL] Cave (ps 2.0)

[hellfire]

Hi everybody,

here's an effect inspired by monkey, a winamp-plugin by Ryan Geiss.

Unlike the original, I wanted to give it a more "realistic" look with smoother surface, proper texturing and a more organic touch.
I already wanted to try this for years, but never really found time until yesterday.
The implementation was pretty straight forward, I did the geometry-generation (including parameter tweaking) yesterday evening and - 1st of may is holiday here - a *very* simple texture-generator with gui today.

So what it does is twirling a set of intersecting pipes into a volume (effectively a 64x64x128 grid) and generating the iso-surface using a marching cubes algorithm.
The shading is done by simple vertex-coloring using some kind of local ambient-occlusion approach - since I got the volume-grid anyway, I simply look for potential occluders in the vertex' surrounding.
Texturing is done using one simple generated 2D texture which is mapped from all three canonical axes and blended over at the cross-sections - which works pretty well as long as the texture has rather low contrast.
Since this is done at per-pixel-level it requires ps 2.0 to run (actually it *would* work with ps 1.1 but glsl doesn't really support those).
The texture itself is generated from a set of differently coloured and blended plasmaclouds (and looks like this).
When I have some spare time again, I will definetly try to improve it, as it still looks somewhat too ... generated.
But since this will probably not happen before the end of the challenge, I'm already posting it now.

I didn't go for much size-optimizing here, but then again it isn't actually big either.
At the moment the source is probably way too messy to be of any use, but if anyone is interested in details, I'm willingly telling.

Enjoy.


If, for whatever reason, it won't run on your machine, here is a video, too.
Also attached a shot of the current texture (downsampled, "actual size" is 2048x2048).

[Clyde]

Wow! Thats amazingly awesome. Welldone dude

[rain_storm]

Yeah very impressive beautiful textures, this is an awesome entry hellfire

[Rbz]

Really good one, well done 

[Voltage]

Jeepers!  Great entry, this is fantastic.  Very professional. 

I like the geometry the most, although the textures and shading are funky too. 

Excuse me while I go and look up marching cubes....

[va!n]

@hellfire:
wow! its fucking great and kicking ass!

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Marching cubes algorithm is now free for public implementation. There was a time when it was protected.

GREAT Work!

[hellfire]

Thanks for your appreciation!
At the moment it's a bit boring to look at, guess I should add some dynamic lighting or something...
I'm open to any ideas

A comprehensive article about marching cubes can be found here.
Patents aren't of much concern for uncommercial home-dev - at the end we're using mp3, too...

[Optimus]

Wow! Nice, very nice!!!

[Shockwave]

What can I say except it looks fabulous!
Thanks for entering the challenge and good luck with the voting, this will do well in the voting I think.

[mind]

damn, thats pretty damn funky good job

and speaking of beeing interested, i wouldnt mind taking a peek at your texture code.. those clouds look pretty nifty

[hellfire]

i wouldnt mind taking a peek at your texture code..

Oh well, there's absolutely nothing special about that, except maybe that I'm working at 16bit-precision per channel, so I can mess with the levels without running into colour-banding.
The "cloud" is generated recursively:
starting from a flat (all 4 corners have equal colour) 0,0..512,512 image, a new point is created in the center which gets the average of the corner-colours plus/minus some randomness. The resulting four sub-images are then subdivided again until a 1x1 area is reached where the current colour is stored.
All the rest is just some histogram-equalization (of the simplest form), colouring and alpha-blending between layers.

[mind]

i wouldnt mind taking a peek at your texture code..

Oh well, there's absolutely nothing special about that, except maybe that I'm working at 16bit-precision per channel, so I can mess with the levels without running into colour-banding.
The "cloud" is generated recursively:
starting from a flat (all 4 corners have equal colour) 0,0..512,512 image, a new point is created in the center which gets the average of the corner-colours plus/minus some randomness. The resulting four sub-images are then subdivided again until a 1x1 area is reached where the current colour is stored.
All the rest is just some histogram-equalization (of the simplest form), colouring and alpha-blending between layers.

ohh a normal recursive subdivision plasma it looked very different from those plasmas, but i guess its the histogram levels and blending used

[Jim]

Very nice indeed!
Jim

[Dr_D]

Wow. That's just... Wow. 

[stormbringer]

Fantastic indeed! Maybe it just misses a starship and some aliens to blast! Never saw a shoot'em up usin this.....

[benny!]

Awesome effect. Runs very smooth here!
Well done, hellfire!!!

Keep us informed with any new version you produce!


@Stormbringer:
That would be indeed interesting to see a game like
this. Remember DESCENT ?

[hellfire]

Since you asked, here's a different version
Played a bit with light, color and texture - not exactly what I was looking for, but what the hell...
Now looks different every time you run it.

[Rbz]

Should it look like this image

[hellfire]

Err, well... no!
But to be honest I somewhat like that, too
What card is that?