0
Description
As a big fan of the demoscene's 64kb intros, I'm very interested in procedural generation of almost everything: Textures, sound ... or just ordinary meshes. Well, these meshes are not-so-ordinary, I believe. Whereas some of you may be familiar with superquadrics, the collage above shows the even superior supershapes. Basically, you use two 2D superformulas which are extruded to 3D using the spherical or toroidal product to generate these meshes. Many thanks to Paul Bourke, by the way, for the resources about supershapes on his excellent site.
The meshes are rendered using my GALE "Graphics Abstraction Layer Engine", which is all a tiny math library, a simple scene graph and a C++ wrapper for OpenGL extensions. I hope GALE's source code will be publicly available at my site later this year. The effects used in the screenshots are (left to right, top to bottom): Gooch-shading using GLSL (taken from the OpenGL Orange Book), cubic environment-mapping of a toroidal supershape (cubemap taken from the NVIDIA SDK), HDR environment-mapping of a spherical supershape (cubemap taken from the Light Probe Image Gallery) and metal-paint shading, taken again from the NVIDIA SDK. As everything was rendered on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, I needed to optimize the NVIDIA shader a little bit to make in fit into the shader instruction limit of the 9800.
Famous last words: Throw away Cg, GLSL rules ;-)
