[Yigit Ilguner] Weekly Report 27.11.2009

This week, I looked for free 3D engines. Since OpenGL's features are not sufficent for our project, I searched more suitable 3D engines. I found ogre3d, Irrlicht Engine, and Crystal Space 3D.

Ogre3d Engine : Simple, easy to use interface designed to minimise the effort required to render 3D scenes, and to be independent of 3D implementation. Common requirements like render state management, spatial culling, dealing with transparency are done automatically. Supported platforms are Windows (all major versions), Linux and Mac OSX.

Irrlicht Engine : The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is a high level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with a documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is easy to use. Irrlicht Engine is platform independent. It runs on Windows95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Linux, OSX.

Crystal Space 3D : Crystal Space 3D is highly platform independent with good platform abstraction. Officially supports Linux, OSX and Windows using a wide range of compilers. Contains modules for 2d and 3d graphics, sound, collision detection and dynamics via ODE and bullet as well as support modules for filesystem abstraction, xml loading etc. Crystal Space includes a foliage generator. This generator can randomly (based on user supplied input like density map and material based densities) place objects like stones, trees, grass, and so on. Skeletal animation and dynamic shadows let users create characters that look and feel more lifelike.

[Hasan Serdar Adali] Weekly Report 27/10/2009

This week i searched for 3d design tools that we can use in our project.We planned to use pure OpenGl first, but it is really hard to develop complicated model&animations using OpenGl.The best alternative would have been using Autodesk 3ds Max(formerly 3D Studio Max) if we had that much money(its price is between 3k-4k $. But we need a free tool.Here is what i found:

Blender:Free open source 3D content creation tool.In order to use it,pyhton programming language is necessary.

Google SketchUp:Another free software for designing 3D models.It is claimed to be easy to learn.One of its feautures is that this software can also be used in Turkish.There is also a extensible software SketchUp Pro available in English.

3DPlus:Tool for 3D graphics design.

I downloaded all of these softwares.As soon as i get familiar with these products,i will list their pros and cons.

[Mehmet Deveci] Weekly Report 25.11.09

I drew sequence diagram for Usher GMR which was missing at SRS document. I also called Carrefour-Cepa to arrange a meeting, however since they were not available this week, we had to postpone the meeting. We will meet 03.12 most probably.