Welcome

I'm enjoying my new camera so much, i made a new demo just to show it off. Here's a random assortment of cubes in space where the camera does a linear fly-though of the area while tracking a point in the middle of the cubes. I also added fog in one demo so that the cubes appear from out of the dark as you fly through them!

Now i've added a lens function to the camera. It has the ability to open up to specific viewing angles now. I improved the Cube Swap demo and tried ultra wide angle and telephoto scenarios.

Since i now have a useful camera with cool movement and tracking abilities, i modded the original Cube Swap demo to use the camera. Now it picks the first cube and tracks it across the screen, keeping it centered in the window. I also added "servo speed" to the camera to limit the maximum rotational speed of the camera to make it more realistic and keep it from "snapping" or flipping when an object flies under or over the camera.

Now that i've learned enough to be useful, it's time to get serious. Until now, the viewing angles and transforms were laboriously calculated and positioned by hand. This has gotten rather frustrating and time consuming so it's now time to create a proper 3D camera class. I don't know much about Quaternions and matrices, so i have to use what i know. Here's my not-so-exciting 2-axis camera demo. It has 360 degree yaw and 180 degree pitch rotation. Now i can simply type in the coordinates of the camera and the target and it rotates itself perfectly every time. No more typing glRotate() by hand!

... And finally a convincing fishy! I added some handy leopard print texturing (which i'm learning in the Red Book) and the vertex normals are all corrected now. He also has a sinewave swimming action (sine is a simple function to add). In this scene, Fishy slowly swims out of the blue water (OpenGL fog) and right past the viewer for a short scene.

I got the structure right, but now the vertex normals for lighting are totally wonky. They should be sticking straight out, but go in all kinds of wacky directions. I did eventually get them calculated correctly.

I also tried to create more variables in the fish creation functions. This poor fish had a really bad sinewave function. Bad enough to take a picture!

Okay, enough goofing off. Let's get to the part where i make an actual fish. For this trick, i'm going to try to create the fish from scratch. The Grand Ultimate Goal is to create procedurally rendered fish: procedural both in textures and geometry. For now i'm going to try to create the fish frame using manual coding and simple functions; no modeling software allowed!

The first attempt was comical enough to take a screeshot of, as was the second. Eventually i did manage to create a complete a vertex mesh with a reasonably fishlike appearence.