Things to try out in OpenGL

OpenGL Development
#1

Mornin’, gentlemen.

I’ll cut to the chase instead of writing an entire essay and beating around the bush (which I do a lot). I’d love to have a list of awesome effects that I can attempt to implement, just for the kicks. For example, I’ve never tried to implement depth-of-field, or volumetric light scattering (a.k.a. god rays). Fractal terrain generation is at the top of my list (because it’s so darn cool!), but the list just isn’t long enough, so I need your help to lengthen it.

Add to the list!

  1. Fractal terrain generation
  2. Volumetric light scattering
  3. Dynamic reflections
  4. Depth of field
  5. Refraction
  6. Clouds (smoke)
#2

Shader cloud generation is cool, multisampled fog (words I pulled out of my ass that means mixing colors together to generate neat fog), rainbow shadows, idk what its called but stencil outline? idk its black rendered behind a model to give it an outline like in the game Borderlands.

#3

Stencil outlines are really, really easy to implement. You should give it a go!

Also, I added clouds to the list.

#4

I just finished up getting my textures all situated and added some structure to the code. I am in no mood to learn something like that. Right now I am struggling with heightmaps and logic that goes into it. I hate the idea of having to use a texture for a heightmap so I am loading a file up to an intbuffer containing the information necessary. I don’t know how this will go, but it’ll be fine I’m sure. Never frickin mind

Rainbow shadows is something I’ve never seen before. Custom shadows for that fact. I haven’t seen textures rendered as shadows. Not that this is hard, but I feel it could make something cool.

#5

Shameless plug
Looping noise using OpenSimplexNoise: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/opensimplexnoise-looping-noise/36701/view.html
Weighted and Unweighted looping voronoi maps (great for mountains!!): http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/wrapped-weighted-voronoi-heightmap-generator/37225/msg/358139/view.html#msg358139

#6
  • Appearance Space Texture Synthesis 8)
    (Would be very handy for terrain generation - especially if you want to have cliffs…)