the 23rd birthday

This year I decided to be a little more accepting to friends' well wishes, which is a little different from my usual I-don't-want-anything protocol in previous years. The outcome wasn't too bad :)

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I am not satisfied with what I did for CG Assignment 3. I simply wasn't inspired to come up with anything good, which was very frustrating.


First part was simple enough, although I don't know if I did correctly. Shown above is a sphere already rendered with flat shading. My task was to implement smooth shading and 'shininess', which is light reflected off the surface, as shown below.


Then we had to draw our own primitive objects, and I came up with an ellipsoid (which was just the original sphere with different radius for the three axes) and a cylinder.


The creative (and the hard) part now comes in - implement 2 composite objects.


A conversation with a friend in the last hours led me to create this pendulum, which everyone can see, is just a simple combination of spheres and cylinders. And no, they don't move.


By the time I had some ideas forming in my head it was already too late to do much. I thought of a planet with trees and flowers and people all over it, Managed to get the trees out, but an online meeting at night killed any chance of me drawing any flower. End result is nothing impressive.

Better luck next time I hope.

Priorities for this weekend: Network assignment, SS essay, CS3215, and even more stuff to clear from my summer project last year.

Other important stuff to do: Physics lab report, understand normal vectors and parametric vectors.

still alive

Its always sad to read about news of natural disasters and how many people had been killed or had gone missing. But then I sit back and think, [to quote a friend] what will come, will come eventually. Life goes on.

I'm amazed at the calmness of the Japanese. Even when stocking up supplies, they actually queued up orderly at shops to purchase. And not to mention so far there have been no news [or maybe I just haven't heard any] of looting. In Singapore, people are already fighting over MRT seats during peacetime.

We still have a long way to go in calling ourselves a First World country.

Past two weeks had been chaotic with three midterm tests, a CS3215 assignment, a Singapore Studies tutorial facilitation, a visit to Changi Chapel and Museum as part of a group project for the SS module, fixing stuff from last year's summer project, and IPPT [which I failed by a miserable 8 seconds in my 2.4km run zz], together with the usual dose of weekly tutorials and assignments.

Gave myself a break on Saturday by having dinner and playing L4D2 with friends. L4D2 turned out to be quite fun!

This week onwards the chaos will be back again; had just spent lovely Sunday in school. Well the consolation is that tests have been taken out of the equation. Priority for the week: Mastering Physics Assignment 5, Computer Graphics Assignment 3, and fixing even more stuff from last year's summer project.

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CG Assignment 2! Spent quite a bit of time on it because the competition from the cohort is a little intense. But overall I got a good mark for the work I put in hehe.



Assignment 2 was to be familiar with rotation, translation and scaling. Above is the normal mode. Basically planets revolving around a Sun, along with a jumping Pig which I koped from Assignment 1. Optional stuff what I did were random stars fading in and out at random times and simple bright/dark sides of planets depending on which side faces the Sun.



Pressing 'T' switches on to a clock mode, which the planets would represent the hands on the clock. Optional stuff that I did were shifting of the stars to represent the face of the clock, and shifting the stars back to their original positions when switching back to normal mode.

Computationally this assignment is quite intense. Generating 450 stars and 9 planets with random calculations all the time resulted in my laptop's fan spinning at full speed if I were to run the application for more than 5 minutes. The computationally intense part is actually the rand() function.