Download/view project "to do" list (Word document)

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19 April:

Downloaded XFrog today (the software they use in "Realistic Modeling and Rendering of Plant Ecosystems"). Naturally, however, it's not working. It's seriously driving me nuts right now. I'll try taking the files home and installing them there. Otherwise I'll try something more drastic.

30 April:

Found some great websites today:

http://home.wanadoo.nl/laurens.lapre/ has some L-Systems software which I plan to look at and a whole list of Prof. Prusinkiewicz's publications. Many of these I had read already but there were some new ones I'll look at this weekend coz ONCE AGAIN my Adobe Acrobat is playing up. Yay, what fun.

http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Research/bmv/vmm/title.html is an online book by Prof. Prusinkiewicz called "Visual Models of Morphogenesis: A Guided Tour". Dunno how helpful it'll be to me yet but we'll see.

http://www.uni-forst.gwdg.de/~wkurth/plant.html is the website of the Institute of Forest Biometry and Informatics' Plant Modelling Group led by Prof. Kurth. I emailed him today to ask if I could get hold of the GROGRA software that Parish and Muller referenced in "Procedural Modeling of Cities".

OK, am going to take XFrog home this afternoon and work on it this weekend when I get bored of reading. Hopefully, should have something solid by Monday.

3 May:

OK, had a look at XFrog this weekend and it looks promising. Need to just learn how to actually use it! Found a website with a whole lot of plants modelled in XFrog called Xfrog Public Plants (http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/ST2/cg/downloads/publicplants/) and I'll have a look at some of those when I've brought in my flash drive to save them on! (Silly me). I also joined an XFrog mailing list today - hope it'll come in useful as we go (NB: joined as tsar_42).

May 11:

Winfried Kurth emailed me today with his plant modeling language, GROGRA. Will have a look at that as soon as I get around to extracting it. It's in tar format.

May 14:

OK, I've been terrible and not been writing - had a bit of a bad week what with my grandpa's funeral on Friday. Anyway, back to work now. Had the meeting as usual today and I think I'm back on track now.

May 17:

Got an email from Prof Prusinkiewicz today. He wished me luck in my project but he said he'll be out of Calgary until September so he won't be able to help me at all. Oh well, nice of him to reply anyway!

May 19:

Got half my draft lit review done yesterday. Hoping to finish off the other half tonight. Cervisia ... well, it's still giving me issues. Shaun reckons it might be the version of C I have installed. Hopefully we can fix that this afternoon. I'm going to work some more on my L-System interpretation algorithm now.

Downloaded a Perl L-System parser from http://www.geocities.com/ffrog.geo/perl.html

OK, draft of literature survey is in.

May 26:

Should have the second draft of my lit survey finished tonight. That'll give the weekend to tweak it.

I installed the Fedora 2 OS on my machine on Monday (when I say I, I trust you all know I mean Shaun of course!) and today he and Chris got my Windows working again so I'm all set! Anyway.

With Fedora, the problems with harrier are much less so today I got my tree modeller working (put a tree in each property). Then I put the tree in the corner, then I added a parameter to choose the type of tree and now I have incorporated a random number to choose the tree type. Tomorrow, I'll look at the use of the random seed and at scaling the trees coz at the mo they're little baby trees. Shrubs, really ;-)

July 29:

Back from the vac, refreshed and all of that. Did my presentation yesterday - went pretty well I thought so now that's done. Today I drew up a timetable with all the stuff I still need to do on my project - I think it's pretty realistic and it breaks all the stuff into nice manageable pieces so am not stressing out so much now! Also found a guy at Trinity College doing a project on L-System modellers for Mac. Will email him and see if we can chat about it.

Also today I played around with the harrier stuff trying to understand how to make shapes. Did well so tomorrow I'll work on more complex shapes and adding parameters.

3 August:

Yay! Made the Mesh class stop being nasty to me and have now created some square trees. Then I made a branching tree. And now I've added a new procedure to handle the branching which takes the angle, axis and length as parameters.

Here's a nice picture of my square tree.

Here's my first branching tree and my procedural branching tree

5 August:

Right. Today I coded my L-System translation algorithm and it WORKS!!! well, for a simple system anyway. Will do more thorough testing tomorrow. Also tomorrow, I'll create my "cylinders" - they're not gonna be circular but something like 20-sided figures.

At the moment, my L-System understands the following symbols:
F - segment
< - rotate -45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around z axis
> - rotate 45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around z axis
& - rotate -45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around x axis
@ - rotate 45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around x axis
% - rotate -45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around y axis
# - rotate 45 degrees (PI/4 radians) around y axis

I'll add parameters and other stuff as the week progresses.

10 August:

Sponsor visit this afternoon - went well. Have created some LSystems with and without parameters (see IMAGES page). Tomorrow will work on adding parameters to the above symbols (to specify angle size). Will also look at subdivision surfaces which I can use in place of icosagons to create cylinders from my rectangular cubes.

16 August:

Today I started on my LSystem file parser. Fought with character arrays and strings for a few hours then decided to go home and clear my head. At the moment, an LSystem file looks like this but the parser only recognises the header:

LSYSTEM
numReplacementRules lenStartString (both integers)
Startstring
List of replacement rules (structure: symbol string)

These files are saved as filename.sys

13 September:

I've been looking at implementing generalised meshes and multi-set L-Systems. Decided today that my L-System parser just isn't enough to handle multi-set L-Systems. So I'm going to implement a distribution function first and maybe do multi-set L-Systems later if there's time. Also decided that COCO/R is a good way to go so will look at that. I think generalised meshes sould be ok as it's just implementation of a number of smoothing functions.

Also finally got around to putting the papers I'll need onto the docarc which will make referencing easier for my paper.

14 September:

Found a great webpage which describes and allows you to download a forest plugin for 3D Studio Max. http://www.itoosoft.com/english/forest_description.html

Applied a random placement algorithm to place my trees in the forest space. It also randomly chooses which plant to plant. Tomorrow I must work on implementing domination which will stunt the growth of or kill a dominated plant.

12 October:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME!

Look how cool I am - I even came in to do work on my birthday, despite an order from Jude not to! Actually got quite a lot done.

Changed my program so it reads the population information from a new data structure (called, gasp, Population). This means positions and sizes aren't recalculated every frame but can be updated from the old data. It's not working quite as planned yet - the domination algorithm needs some tweaking. But once I get that done I'm home free. Aside from looking into the Maierhofer texturing. YAY!

Also started my write-up this morning. Am now slightly less stressed out about the fact that I have less than a month left!