Update: Model and early code problems

Modeling Update

I've learned several new things since last week and my progress is pretty much summed up in the below pictures.

Don't mind the lips, they are still a work in progress

The face was surprisingly much easier to model than I thought. I expected to push around vertices by the hours, and instead, with just a few moves here and there from the initial sphere, the basic shape of the face was already in position. Of course it definitely was nothing too spectacular, as it still looked extremely blocky, but the critical thing here is that it let me visualize the face very easily, and much faster than I thought I would have. Unfortunately I did not foresee to take pictures of an in-progress work before this one, but it was just a basic shape at the time, so I thought it was nothing special.

Comparison between the 3D model of the face and the reference sketch

I have completed the basic anatomy of the character, which helped me understand proportions of the human form, so I could model other details around it. The point being here is that the anatomy was definitely the most difficult part to model (especially the chest, armpit and back area), and once that is over with, details will be of no fuss. The above picture shows that the 3D model is not exactly a true replica of the original sketch, but some of the features of the face just did not make any sense when put into a 3D context, so I changed the structure of the face a little to make it seem more believable.

As mentioned before, I have modeled the pauldron, vambrace, loincloth and the ornament in the middle in one fell swoop, and most were relatively simple except the pauldron. It was an awfully confusing encounter because for some reason I could just not get the idea that the pauldron was just essentially a rectangle in a curved shape (this is where shading on the original sketch would have helped). I tried several different ways to model it, like making several layers of material underneath the main layer, and I tried making it look rounder, but in the end I ended up with a much simpler model. I scrapped those ideas for now because they were taking up too much time, but now that I've moved on from detail, and onto the face, I may get back to the pauldron after it is complete.

Problems Arise

On the code front, I've been trying to push myself to start understanding Wild Magic and the results are less than successful.


My initial thought was to just jump straight into the hard questions (specifically, shaders, as I think I am the person in my group that will be responsible for such things) and it was just incredibly difficult to even know how to begin such a task. I asked the TA in one of the tutorials about how shaders are implemented in Wild Magic, and I received a complicated and worrisome reply. In OpenGL, it was a rather simple task, where you simply wrote whatever code you wished, and passed that code to the program and the shader code would just execute as you told it to. Very simple process, albeit probably primitive to a professional work flow, but it worked. It dawned on me that WildMagic will not simply let me walk in and do whatever I want. First of all, the shaders are in a different format, although this isn't really a big problem, it's something to think about. The main issue here is how does WildMagic intake, use and compile these shaders? The TA said something about using a specific compiler to concert the shaders to a specific format before use, and that they had to be created in FX Composer.


At this point, I decided to just dig around in the code and the various include files that stemmed form the 'mainGame.h' file. This was counter-productive, as searching through headers and trying to understand what everything meant just confused me even more. Maybe I just didn't spend enough time with it, but the more and more I tried looking, the more I got confused. What I got out of this is that having such a complicated tool at your disposal is a very daunting thing indeed. I tried looking through the book for a brief while, but only found the theory on shaders (which, for the most part, I understand), but nothing arose about the actual code implementation of the shader in the chapter. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but for now, it is going to be irrelevant due to my conclusions from this little information hunt.


I've concluded that jumping into the hard questions would waste a lot of my time, and just put a lot of stress on me. My group members for the most part, felt the same way. Our decision was that each group member will begin with similar if not the same easy questions first. The rationale is that we form a sort of 'supporting net' where each one of us goes through the very basics of the engine, and as we learn new capabilities, facts and become more experienced, we share this information with each other to help us get a tighter grasp on the engine. After the midterm for this class, we will branch out and attempt to have each group member do something different so we have the maximum possible spread over the questions, which will no doubt help us in the end. I'm not sure if a nightmare question will be worth it yet, as we don't really know much about the engine right now.