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OpenGL ProgrammingDuring my final year as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, I had the good fortune of being able to take Sandy Hill's courses in computer graphics. The courses involved creating several OpenGL/GLUT programs such as a 2D wireframe viewer, a Mandelbrot viewer, a 3D castle viewer, and a ray-tracer. Although much of the low-level code was abstracted from the students, we were still responsible for implementing all the mathematical aspects of each program. Each of the following programs was developed under Win32 using Microsoft VC++ version 5.Ray TracerThe Assignment given over the course of the Sandy Hill's second semester computer graphics course was to implement a ray tracer - complete with Cook-Torrance illumination, reflection, refraction, transparency, shadows, procedural surfaces, and booleans. I worked along with another student, Frank Levine, to create this ray tracer from skeletal code that was provided by the professor.
View ray tracer code sample Download Ray Tracer for Win32 (requires OpenGL and GLUT DLLs) Tower of EscherThe final project for Sandy Hill's fall 1998 graphics course was to make a three-dimensional fly-through of a castle. The program allows the user to navigate through some OpenGL rendered geometry using the mouse and keyboard. This project incorporated topics such as 3D transformations, transformations from world to camera to viewport to window coordinates, texture mapping, and animated textures.For this project I modeled "The Tower of Escher" which attempts to incorporate elements from M.C. Escher's artwork into one architectural monstrosity. Some of Escher's works that I attempted to incorporate were "Tower of Babel", "Ascending and Descending", "Knots", and "Relativity". 
There are several elements of the tower in addition to the purely Escher-inspired ones. Douglas Hofstadter was one of Escher's biggest fans, and I am a fan of them both, so I had to include a rotating "Godel, Escher, Bach" symbol in the art gallery. Finally, the "game of life" is played out on the front wall of the tower. 
View Tower of Escher code sample Download tower of Escher for Win32 (requires OpenGL and GLUT DLLs) Mandelbrot ViewerThis assignment was to make a program that would allow the user to view the Mandelbrot Set up to a given level of magnification. The program renders the fractal at progressively sharper resolutions during program idle time; this allows the user to navigate quickly despite the complexity of rendering a detailed section of the Mandelbrot Set. The user can easily zoom in by dragging rectangles in the screen window with the mouse. I am particularly proud of the mapping from orbit times to RGB values (trans: I tweaked the color-scheme to my liking :).
 Download Mandelbrot Viewer for Win32 (requires OpenGL and GLUT DLLs) Wireframe ViewerThe purpose of this assignment was to become familiar with OpenGL programming using the GLUT toolkit, as well as transformations from world coordinates to view coordinates to screen coordinates. The user can view several different two-dimensional drawings, and zoom in on arbitrary rectangles within the drawings. Aspect ratio is maintained regardless of zoom, or window shape. In addition to the drawings, two procedural images are drawn - the "Sierpinsky Gasket" and a "Gingerbread Man".
Download Wireframe viewer for Win32 (requires OpenGL and GLUT DLLs) |