******* 24 BIT REALTIME DEMO *******

Landscape + Facial animation written by Matt Taylor of Living Colour.

Look out for future releases from Living Colour.


1. Landscape.

Fasten your seatbelts, because here we go....

This is a realtime flight over a fractal terrain.


Control.

To control your 'plane',  use the mouse. 

Left button - speeds up.
Middle button - slows down.
Right button - quits.

The mouse movement should be fairly intuitive.

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Technical Info.
 
To achieve the high degree of realism displayed in the landscape,
a technique known as texture mapping is used. This means that,
instead of filling the land up with a solid colour, you use a 
predefined sprite pattern, distorted to fit the shape you are filling.
In this case, the sprites were grabbed from the 'slide show'
images, supplied with the machine, and then merged into one another,
to create one big sprite, which has water (low heights) at one end,
and forest (high heights) at the other.

Also note that as the landscape goes towards the horizon, the colours
all tend to a similar value. (In this case, the orangy pink of a late
summer afternoon....ahhhhh, remember those?? ). 
This effect is seen in real life, and is caused by the atmosphere 
scattering different colours, by different amounts.


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2. Facial Animation.

An example of realtime, 3D morphing of a phototexured face.

Control.

Moving the mouse left and right, spins the face.

Various button combinations, generate different expressions.

Holding down all 3 buttons quits.

Moving the mouse up and down, whilst generating an expression,
controls the intensity of that expression.

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Technical Info.

The face started off life as a 2D bitmap photograph.
The bitmap was then extruded into the 3rd dimension...

( Imagine you had a lifesize photo of your face, obviously a 
2D image. Then imagine pressing the photo onto your real face, 
so it becomes like a party mask, with a 3rd dimension ).

Unfortunately, the owner of the bitmap face used in this demo, was
not around to have her face pressed into bits of paper, so I
had to make the 3rd dimension up myself.

To do this, I divided the bitmap up into a mesh. To each vertex of
the mesh I assigned a depth. ( e.g the vertex at the tip of the nose
would obviously be further out (less depth) than the eye).

This done, it was possible to draw the face, as if it was a real face.
Like the landscape, this is a form of texture mapping.

The expressions were achieved my moving the vertexes of the mesh
a little in relation to each other.( e.g to make a smile, the vertexes
near the corners of the mouth would be moved upwards).

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Matt Taylor of Living Colour.  (13/11/94).


