Kiran Sudhakara

For my final CMSC 491G project, I'm working on precomputed radiance transfer and subsurface scattering with Alex MacDonald. My contribution is a GPU accelerated transfer vector generator. Here's a model I made along with the lighting solution from my generator. An object can be diffusely lit and shadowed in any lighting situation (any number of lights, infinitely distant) with no impact on performance. Expensive computations like subsurface scattering and soft shadows are calculated completely offline and don't affect the framerate at all. While there are many tradeoffs associated with this technique, the results look promising. I think someday soon this will be a viable option for games.

11/17/08- Irradiance Mapping With Spherical Harmonics

Here's my 4th graphics assignment completed. This uses an array of environment maps converted to spherical harmonics to illuminate an apple. The SH environment maps are smoothly interpolated as the object moves around so there's no visible light popping.

11/12/08- Phong Reflection

I was playing around with environment cubemapping and decided to see what phong reflections would look like. For perfectly reflective materials they seem to work great. With some tricks, less reflective materials can be faked. Unfortunately Blinn-Phong reflections, which would look much better, can't be recorded into a cubemap (as far as I know). When switching to irradiance mapping techniques, phong reflection may have to suffice for specularity.

11/10/08- My Room

For my 4th graphics assignment I need an environment that has both light areas and dark areas. I chose to build my room in GTK Radiant. This is entirely my own artwork except the floor texture. More on this assignment to come...

11/5/08- Cubic Uniform B-Splines

My 3rd graphics assignment. This is a subdivided spline patch with detail mapping applied in the vertex shader. Also there's fully reflective water. I photosourced the textures but other than that all the code/art is my own work.

10/28/08- Shader Demo 1

I've been working on a skin shader demo for my computer graphics class. Here I've implemented shadow mapping, normal mapping, and specular mapping. I also created the artwork myself.

10/27/08- BreakAway Games

I spent the past summer as a programming intern at BreakAway Games. Most of my work dealt with animation scheduling and AI. I also wrote a cool system to record and play back game sessions.

4/24/08- MGS: Clone

I added some polish and uploaded a demo video! This is the final demo. I've moved the
code to an SVN server because a friend of mine expressed interest in helping develop.
I'm not quite sure where we'll go with this but it should be fun!

04/11/08- MGS: Clone

I put in a system to deliver the storyline. Now the level designer can write a dialogue script
and within the map editor specify that script for an area. Also I statically linked the runtime
libraries to get rid of a silly error some people were having. If you couldn't run the game
before, it should work now. The version is now 1.2 and it's up for download.

04/07/08- MGS: Clone

I updated MGS: Clone to version 1.1. It was hard for players to figure out how they were
discovered, so I made the enemy and player face eachother when the player loses. It's still
a little rough but it's much better. For now, once you get caught you have to press 'R' to
reload the round. I also added some music that I made. It started out as a Jurassic 5
cover but that sucked so I changed it. The download is in the MGS Clone section.

04/02/08- GUI Project

I'm working on an interesting project for my GUI class. I'm making all the objects (2d and
3d) render out an assigned ID color to a texture. When someone clicks the mouse I'm
reading the color from the texture and using that to call the correct mouse callback so the
mouse click is only sent to the object that the user clicked on. Disadvantages aside, it
allows accurate selection on 3d objects with no raytracing! It also solves the problem of
overlapping objects because it only selects the front object. Perhaps I'll post the project
when I'm farther along.

03/06/08- MGS: Clone

MGSC Version 1.0 is up for download in the MGS: Clone section. In this version I added
bots and some very rough gameplay. See if you can beat it!