Heading Towards the End

Most of the work I have been doing lately has been on writing up my actual dissertation. While I'm getting there in terms of quantity I really need to put in diagrams, results tables and generally detail to clear things up. I've tried to finish up working on the application but I continually find myself toying with little things.

Most changes have been minor optimisations, things such as; streamlining the shader and vertex structures, reducing the number of unecessary temporary variables. I rethought the Indices to reduce Draw Indexed Primitive calls from 128 to 65, ideally it could be reduced to 2 but that would involve finding a way to pass the random number to the geometry shader for each strip.

I spent some time trying to arrange the hair strips in a more sensible fashion though I have not had much success with that, it's hard to shake the blockiness in particular.



The collision detection has been improved, the forces being calculated most of the time were far too big because the distances weren't normalised. The result of this being the hair would thrash wildly rather than trying to find equilibrium. Generally all the collision detection manages to do though is give the hair a bit of volume, intersections are still very likely to occur and create visual artefacts due to the polygons passing through each other when they do.

I toyed with a few features of DirectX 10 but lack of clarity in the available documentation left me lost as to how to actually utilise features such as Texture2DMS which could perhaps potentially have been useful in the shadow mapping.

I find myself not sure whether I'm pleased or disappointed with the application as it stands. Performance wise it reaches acceptable standards but it falls short on many areas of Appearance and Behaviour.