Tag: Bournemouth University

Compiling Optix with Qt Creator!

Posted on Posted in Real Time Ray TracingTagged , , , , , , 3 Comments

Alas for for my major project I’ve have delved into the realm of path tracing. This savage beast to tame on computers but such tools such as NVidia’s OptiX makes life good again! Unfortunately Optix is still fairly new so not too many people know too much about it so essentially you have to read pages and pages of documentation to understand it. Furthermore the use of Optix with Qt is essentially non existent. Luckily if you are like I and use the Qt IDE (and why wouldn’t you!) Im here to make your first few steps a little easier.

A little bit of background:

So when using the OptiX API the first thing you will notice is that you have to write “Programs” nvidias GPU specific functions. To use these programs with your OptiX engine they must be in the form of NVidias PTX immediate assembly language. This is then read in at runtime by your program. To generate this PTX code you will need the NVCC compiler which will come with your drivers when you install cuda. If you have done any research into this before you will know that to translate into PTX code you will need to call the -ptx flag when calling NVCC. So in the simplest case you would call something like this,

nvcc -ptx someOptixProgram.cu

Simply type this into your console and viola! You have a very basic ptx file. But we’re lazy! We dont want to have to do this every time we write/edit a program, so lets get Qt to do it for us.

How to do it:

Essentially we want to add another compiler to our Qt .pro file that compiles any of our OptiX samples before we build the rest of our code. Unlike with cuda we don’t want this code to be turned into object files and linked into our executable. We just want it to be translated to ptx and left alone. Be sure to read the comments and edit according to your own needs!

TARGET=Blank_scene
OBJECTS_DIR=obj

# as I want to support 4.8 and 5 this will set a flag for some of the mac stuff
# mainly in the types.h file for the setMacVisual which is native in Qt5
isEqual(QT_MAJOR_VERSION, 5) {
        cache()
        DEFINES +=QT5BUILD
}
UI_HEADERS_DIR=ui
MOC_DIR=moc

CONFIG-=app_bundle
QT+=gui opengl core
# Whatever sources you want in your program
SOURCES += \
    src/main.cpp \


# Whatever headers you want in your program
HEADERS += \
    include/something.h

INCLUDEPATH +=./include /opt/local/include
#Whatever libs you want in your program
DESTDIR=./
#Whatever libs you want in your program
CONFIG += console
CONFIG -= app_bundle


macx:INCLUDEPATH+=/usr/local/include/
unix:LIBS += -L/usr/local/lib



#Optix Stuff, so any optix program that we wish to turn into PTX code
CUDA_SOURCES += src/draw_color.cu \
                src/pinhole_camera.cu \
                src/constantbg.cu \
                src/box.cu \
                src/phong.cu

#This will change for you, just set it to wherever you have installed cuda
# Path to cuda SDK install
macx:CUDA_DIR = /Developer/NVIDIA/CUDA-6.5
linux:CUDA_DIR = /usr/local/cuda-6.5
# Path to cuda toolkit install
macx:CUDA_SDK = /Developer/NVIDIA/CUDA-6.5/samples
linux:CUDA_SDK = /usr/local/cuda-6.5/samples

# include paths, change this to wherever you have installed OptiX
macx:INCLUDEPATH += /Developer/OptiX/SDK/sutil
macx:INCLUDEPATH += /Developer/OptiX/SDK
linux:INCLUDEPATH += /usr/local/OptiX/SDK/sutil
linux:INCLUDEPATH += /usr/local/OptiX/SDK
INCLUDEPATH += $$CUDA_DIR/include
INCLUDEPATH += $$CUDA_DIR/common/inc/
INCLUDEPATH += $$CUDA_DIR/../shared/inc/
macx:INCLUDEPATH += /Developer/OptiX/include
linux:INCLUDEPATH += /usr/local/OptiX/include
# lib dirs
#QMAKE_LIBDIR += $$CUDA_DIR/lib64
macx:QMAKE_LIBDIR += $$CUDA_DIR/lib
linux:QMAKE_LIBDIR += $$CUDA_DIR/lib64
QMAKE_LIBDIR += $$CUDA_SDK/common/lib
macx:QMAKE_LIBDIR += /Developer/OptiX/lib64
linux:QMAKE_LIBDIR += /usr/local/OptiX/lib64
#Add our cuda and optix libraries
LIBS += -lcudart  -loptix

# nvcc flags (ptxas option verbose is always useful)
# add the PTX flags to compile optix files
NVCCFLAGS = --compiler-options -fno-strict-aliasing -use_fast_math --ptxas-options=-v -ptx

#set our ptx directory so that our ptx files are put somewhere else
PTX_DIR = ptx

# join the includes in a line
CUDA_INC = $$join(INCLUDEPATH,' -I','-I',' ')

# Prepare the extra compiler configuration (taken from the nvidia forum - i'm not an expert in this part)
optix.input = CUDA_SOURCES

#Change our output name to something suitable
optix.output = $$PTX_DIR/${QMAKE_FILE_BASE}.cu.ptx

# Tweak arch according to your GPU's compute capability
# Either run your device query in cuda/samples or look in section 6 here #http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-compiler-driver-nvcc/#axzz3OzHV3KTV
#for optix you can only have one architechture when using the PTX flags when using the -ptx flag you dont want to have the -c flag for compiling
optix.commands = $$CUDA_DIR/bin/nvcc -m64 -gencode arch=compute_52,code=sm_52 $$NVCCFLAGS $$CUDA_INC $$LIBS  ${QMAKE_FILE_NAME} -o ${QMAKE_FILE_OUT}
#use this line for debug code
#optix.commands = $$CUDA_DIR/bin/nvcc -m64 -g -G -gencode arch=compute_52,code=sm_52 $$NVCCFLAGS $$CUDA_INC $$LIBS  ${QMAKE_FILE_NAME} -o ${QMAKE_FILE_OUT}
#Declare that we wnat to do this before compiling the C++ code
optix.CONFIG = target_predeps
#now declare that we don't want to link these files with gcc, otherwise it will treat them as object #files
optix.CONFIG += no_link
optix.dependency_type = TYPE_C
# Tell Qt that we want add our optix compiler
QMAKE_EXTRA_UNIX_COMPILERS += optix

Hurruh! Hopefully you now have a Qt project that compiles all your Optix programs nicely for you, now go off into the wild and make what fabulous ray indulgent programs you desire!

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Master Class: Laplacian Mesh Editing – Update 1

Posted on Posted in Master ClassTagged , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

So to start here is a bit of back story. Our university (Bournemouth) has partnered up with MPC to give us some R&D assignments for our master class which they will judge and give feed back at the end of the project. We had the choice between creating some kind of terrain generation or animation application or if you’re truly hardcore to implement one of a selection of mesh deforming papers from SIGGRAPH. I (being the hardcore of hardcore) decided that my brain clearly isn’t working hard enough at the moment and have chosen the latter. so here is a quick introduction to laplacian mesh editing and what I understand at the moment. Also theres a demo!!! *screams*

So laplacian mesh editing is a form of deformation in which the user will paint weights to a mesh of their choosing and from the manipulation of these weights can magically deform the object before your eyes. But how does one do that you might say? Good question! Well firstly we have to represent our geometry in a different way. You’re probably used to using relative coordinates to represent points in a mesh i.e. Vec3(1,4,5). Well for laplacian mesh editing we represent the point in relation to its neighbouring points.This is called the implicit representation and goes a little like this…

implicitRepresenttaion

So here we have a square made from 4 points (mind blowing!). To find the location of V0 from the other points we can use half the sum of V1 and V3 then add this unknown vector d0 (delta). We can calculate this unknown by simply rearranging the equation just like in Fig 1. Now lets get a bit more crazy and represent all these points in implicit matrix form.

laplaceAndDeltaMatrix

From this form you are now ready to create some deformation! You do this by adding these things called “handles” or “anchors” to our matrix. Say if we want V0 and V2 to be our handles this is how it would look.

laplaceAndDeltaMatrixHandles

Now say if we change the position of V0 and V2 in our delta matrix (denoted b in Fig 3) and then solve for x, this will give use different points because deformation has occurred (Huzzuh!). But you may be thinking to yourself, “How in the world do I solve this? These are not square matrices!”. Another great question! Well here is how…

SolvingTheEqation

Now we have the basis of our laplacian mesh editing! You can deform simple shapes to your hearts desire! But this is by no means a complete. The way we create our matrix A or our “laplace matrix” only currently works for very uniform geometry. For any complicated shapes we will have to calculate this another way. Sadly I dont know that yet 😦 but keep updated with my posts and one day… just maybe… I will!

Anyway here’s a pretty demo!

 

References:
O. Sorkine , D. Cohen-Or , Y. Lipman , M. Alexa, C. Rössl and H.-P. Seidel (2004) Laplacian Surface Editing, Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing: Eurographics

Terrain Generation Collaborative Research Project – Update 2: Thermal Erosion & Data Structures

Posted on Posted in Collaborative Research ProjectTagged , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

When thinking about generating terrain we must first think about how we are going to store our data to represent it. This is a very crucial aspect as depending on the method you use to represent this data will have a direct effect on what kind of terrain you can generate and how large your data structure will be. In a ideal world we want to be able to represent any kind of terrain using minimal memory. The technique we have been using so far is two dimensional height maps. This is a very small way of representing terrain data in which we use a two dimensional array of elements that store height values. This results with a spacial requirement of n^2 bytes, n being the size of our array. This technique has its limitations in what type of terrain you can represent. Being only able to represent height and location information this restricts us to only being able to represent one layer of a surface and cannot represent natural phenomena such as horizontal caves. On the other hand we can represent our terrain in voxel form. This could be represented in a tree dimensional array which allows us to represent a third dimension of data. Where this representation has its draw backs is the size the data structure will be. Unlike our height maps voxels will be the size n^3 bytes, turning terrain that would be megabytes in height maps into gigabytes in voxel data. Therefore we must compromise and combine the two techniques with the data structure proposed in the paper Layered Data Representation for Visual Simulation of Terrain Erosion by B. Benes and R. Forsback. This paper proposes a method of a two dimensional array of elements which contain information about the underlying layers.

E.g.

typedef struct{
PropertiesT data[MAX_LEVEL];
float height;
} ElmT; //one element of the array

PropertiesT is a structure that contains information about the material possibly such as height of the material layer, material type or even density. Unlike in the voxel representation this clumps together layers of the same material providing information about the block which saves large amounts of data. The overall size of the data structure is now more like n^2 * sizeof(ElmT) * bytes which means as long as sizeof(ElmT) is smaller than n our which it is highly likely to be out data structure will be much smaller than the voxel based approach.

This data structure also gives us the freedom to easily implement erosion techniques. The technique we have used is known as thermal erosion and is sited from the same paper. The thermal erosion algorithm is an attempt to represent long term thermal weathering. A material is dissolve because of changes in temperature which cause there terrain to break up and fall down. The eroded part will fall down in the direction of greatest gradient. To achieve this we use the following equation,

thermalErosionEqz

The result of which will give the amount of material to move to neighbouring location i. Delta S is equivalent to 1/2 the largest height difference between the element we wish to erode and its eight neighbours, this must be calculated to stop oscillations in the algorithm. ‘hi’ represents the height of the neighbour we wish to move our material to which is divided by the sum of all our elements neighbouring heights.

Anyway enough of the boring stuff here is pretty video of it all implemented!

Terrain Generation Collaborative Research Project – Introduction & First update

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Welcome to the first update featuring my collaborative research project for my third year of university. The project is made up of a two man team, myself and Toby Gilbert. Our goal to research into new techniques of procedurally generating terrain on the macro and meso levels and maintaining relatively real time rendering of the geometry created. The macro side of generation being the large scale geometry such as mountains, hills and caverns etc.. For this we want to create as physically accurate terrain as possible to enhance realism. The meso being the smaller detail such as trees, boulders and grass, also a very demanding area to draw large volumes of shrubbery while maintaining performance. To increase the progress of our research we have split the two areas of generation between ourselves, Toby being in charge of the meso side of the generation and I shall be looking at the macro.

Initial Research

Terrain generation, a field that has been vastly researched in today’s computer graphics as it can be used in anything from computer games to movies. Therefore having a large amount of research that we can build from. Very basic techniques include simply using height maps, a previously generated texture in which every pixel value represents the height of the surface at the location of the pixel. So height of surface at (x,y) = f(x,y), function f returning the colour value of pixel (x,y) in a texture. This makes for very easy procedural generation by using random noise functions such as Perlin noise to generate the initial texture to be sampled. This method is very quick to implement and complexity can be added by developing more advanced methods to generate your texture. You will find a very detailed exploration of this technique in Realtime Procedural Terrain Generation by Jacob Olsen which uses a combination voronoi diagrams and noise generated by mid-point displacement to create fractal terrain. It also explores simulating erosion techniques such as thermal and hydraulic to improve the physical accuracy of the terrain. The limitations of this method being the terrain will never be able to generate features such as caves or arches in the surface. To achieve this we must look into generating volumetric data which is explored in Arches: a Framework for Modeling Complex Terrains by A. Peytavie ,E. Galin ,J. Grosjean and S. Merillou. In this paper they generate 3-dimensional data set consisting of different materials such a bedrock and sand. They will then simulate how these materials interact with each other and settle under gravity. They finally generate the volumetric data using a technique known as marching cubes. This is an algorithm in which you sample a three dimensional field of voxels and determine what to draw based on how these voxels intersect with the function. For example in the image bellow if one point of our voxel lies inside the shape and the other 7 lie outside then our surface must lie in between and therefore we draw a triangle between these point.

350px-MarchingCubes.svg

Finally we look into the meso side of generation. The challenges of this is that we need a lot of geometry to create a high amount of detail which in turn increases the compute power we will need to render our terrain in real time. Now you can achieve this by instancing geometry which means storing one set of geometry in memory and just drawing it many times. Alternatively in the paper Real-time Realistic Rendering and Lighting of Forests by Eric Bruneton, Fabrice Neyret solves this by rendering these objects as selection of textures different perspectives of an object and blending between them as you move around for a smooth transition between textures. This mean we can draw a large amount of objects very cheaply as textures are extremely optimised on the GPU.

Current Progress

The first step in this project was to implement the generation of the generation of the terrain through marching cubes. To achieve this I have created a modified version of the source code written by Paul Bourke here such that we can generate terrain from height maps. Our first generation program simply uses Perlin noise to generate a height map.

terrainGen

My next step was to make our terrain look a little more natural by rendering the terrain in a slightly more creative manor. For which I have used the technique in A rule-base approach to 3D terrain generation via texture splatting by Jonathan Farraris and Christos Gatzidis. This implementation shades the geometry based on the heights and the normals of its points. For example lower points are mud and grass shaded with brown and green and as the height increases it becomes rocks and snow shaded with grey and white. To further greater this we use the normals to identify sheers cliffs and shade them as rock instead of grass or snow. We can do this by calculating the angle through inverting the y component of the normal and multiplying it by 90. Now we just set a user defined thresh hold of faces above a certain again to shade as cliffs. In our program I have implemented to version of this, one with just block colours and one that uses pre created textures of our different types of terrain.

terrainColouredSmooth terrainWithTextures

My student experiences and advice to those interested in getting into VFX/Games

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Greetings!

Welcome and behold my very first blog post ever! Exciting isn’t it. Well now that you’ve had a moment calm down and those shivers down your spine to settle let me get on to the point of this blog post. I feel that currently in schools and sixth form education there is a lack of information about the VFX/Games industry and how to get into it. I often remember talking to the careers teacher in my college, telling them that I wanted to make games and the responding advice is generally the same. Either “Oh you should probably to IT then” or “I have no idea about that industry”. Both pretty useless pieces of advice. Which I find saddening because its one of the most creative, interesting and fast growing industries around to date. I mean Grand Theft Auto V generated over $800 million in revenue world wide.. On its FIRST DAY! If that’s not worth schools talking about then I don’t know what is. Its time that people loose the stereotype that making games is just a dream because its more within your grasp than you may think. Please remember though these are just my personal opinions so don’t take my word as law!

So before tell you what I think it takes to be achieve in this field let me tell you a little about myself to give you a little more context. My name is Declan Russell (That handsome devil in the picture above 😉 ) I’m currently in my third and final year studying BSc Software Development in Animation, Games and Effects at the NCCA which resides in Bournemouth University. All or at least most of the work I have created here is on my portfolio here so be sure to check that out *shameless self advertising*. In college (sixth form) I studied Maths, Further Maths and Computing A levels, where I originally wanted to be an accountant but after 2 years of having maths for 2/3rds of my week it got a bit stale. I honestly only did the course I’m doing now on a whim! I enjoyed my computing A level and liked playing computer games. I had no real knowledge of the field at all but haven’t regretted the decision since!

Now one of the first questions you may have, at least this is what I always wanted to know was what qualification at sixth form do I need? Overall I would highly recommend doing maths! I know lots of people don’t get on with it but its everywhere in visual effects and you will get really far if you have a good understanding of it. I can’t stress enough how useful maths is! Other than that it really depends on what you are doing. If you want to be some kind of artist, modeller or animator you will need some kind of art qualification and portfolio for most uni courses to consider you. If you’re looking into programming or making games I would consider doing computing. Don’t get this confused with IT! Computing is programming and learning about how a pc works. IT is taking many a screenshot showing that you have achieved the incredibly advanced skill of renaming a file or using word. Computing will give you a basic understanding of how a computer works and even give you some basic coding skills. On a side note though if you’re looking into games I personally feel that you should stay clear from games development courses. As much fun as they sound in sixth form they may give you some basic coding skills but really fall short on the maths side of things and you will struggle later on.

Do I have to be able to program before I go for a VFX degree? No, universities will teach you the coding you need but a bit of experience before and is only ever a bonus!

What application do we use to make VFX? The first applications you are likely to encounter in VFX are applications from the Autodesk suite. The most common and my favourite of which is Maya. This is used for modelling, rigging, animating, rendering and so much more. Maya is a good application to start learning and its free for students! Its got a pretty intuitive interface and there are loads of books on how to use it. A good read to get a lot of the basics is this

What programming languages do you use? The most common programming language you will come across is C++ and as time goes on for graphics you are more likely to learn OpenGL than DirectX now a days, mainly due to its cross compatibility. If you’re want to learn these some good books to read are Beginning C++ Through Game Programming, OpenGL Programming Guide and OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cook Book 

Finally, what uni’s should I look at? Bournemouth! (I may be biased but I don’t care everyone should come here!)

Well that concludes today’s blog post as its now gone midnight and brain functionality is plummeting! Hope I have been of some help and feel free to contact me with any further questions you have about this subject 🙂