Alice and Wonderland (cont.)

Raab, Andreas Andreas.Raab at disney.com
Tue Dec 14 00:02:17 UTC 1999


Ali,

> I remember this type of action from the Alice demo in
> 'Play With Me 7', the bunnys head did the same thing
> (neato). However, what about creating a star field of
> 100 points distribuited within a defined bounding box.

Hm ... well given that you're using a star field it might be better using
some approximate hidden surface elimination, e.g., depth sorting and then
just use image warping. To give you a comparison: The speed difference
between WarpBlt for scaling a (rectangular) image and using the 3D engine is
about a factor of ten (after my recent bunch of speedups in WarpBlt, heh,
heh). Thus, using WarpBlt will give you a definite speed advantage though
it'll require some more work in other places (and this will at some point
eat up the speedup - there *is* a reason for all those different engines out
there ;-) Also, while WarpBlt is really nice for scaling images (such as
stars) it doesn't allow you to use bilinear interpolation (only important if
you scale images up) and blending of textures with colors (from gouraud
shading; only important if you want to use lighting). If none of this is of
interest to you then you probably want to try out some image warping instead
of 'real' 3D.

> Also, i think a collection of model/shape
> auto-generators would be a good addition for Alice.
> Getting more towards creating geometry
> programmatically rather than via files.

Talking about particle generators, eh?! Yes, this would be a nice addition
though generally an expensive one.

  Andreas





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