Jeremy Billote - CSC471 Final Project

Goal

Implement a world builder that allows users to place objects/meshes in the world as they see fit and allow to save/load scenes.

Project Description

Unless a world file is provided, the user is initially presented with an empty world. Regardless of the initial world, the user can freely move around the scene and place objects. Objects can be translated and rotated along/about any axis via keyboard. This allows for fine changes in position/rotation. The world can also be saved to load later.

Usage

final_project <Path to resources directory> <OPTIONAL: World file to load>

World File Format

World files are plaintext and contain the following information in this order:

• Object type (int from 0-4)
• Position X
• Position Y
• Position Z
• Rotation X
• Rotation Y
• Rotation Z
• Material (int from 0-6)

The program does not validate world file structure; it just expects the data in this order.

Controls

• Camera
• Mouse scroll (ie two-finger on laptop) - Rotate camera
• W - Move camera forward
• S - Move camera backward
• A - Move camera to the left
• D - Move camera to the right
• Rotation
• Q, E - Rotate selected object along Y-axis
• R, T - Rotate selected object along X-axis
• Y, U - Rotate selected object along Z-axis
• Z, X - Cycle between available materials
• C, V - Cycle between available objects/meshes
• M - Toggle editor/build mode
• In editor/build mode, the current selected object is visible and can be modified.
• Outside of editor/build mode, keybinds controlling rotation or selected material or object/mesh do not do anything.
• Ctrl + S - Save current world
• World is saved as world.dat in the same directory as the executable.

Lessons Learned

• C++ Features
• File I/O
• Similar to C, file I/O uses similar functions to standard I/O. The fstream library contains functions that are similar to cin and cout.
• String Parsing
• C++'s sstream library allows string parsing similar to Java's Scanner class by using functions similar to cin and cout.

Knowledge Deepened

• Hierarchical Modeling
• While adding the snowman to the list of possible objects for placement, hierarchical modeling concepts were reinforced. Since I built the snowman from the bottom up, adding transforms to the bottom ball of the snowman's body also applied to the rest of the snowman, keeping the snowman's appearance in tact after any transformations.
• 3D Camera
• I found the hardest part of this project to be figuring out how to get the currently selected object to be centered on the screen, regardless of camera position/orientation. To solve this, I had to review how glm::lookAt worked and had to fiddle with it until I got the desired effect.
• .obj Structure
• Discovered that .obj files contain texture coordinates, denoted as vt and that these were automatically loaded by shape.cpp. I had to cut this out of shape.cpp since the GLSL compiler would complain and crash when trying to render ff14_weapon.obj.

External Resources

• ff14_weapon.obj
• Extracted from the Final Fantasy XIV data files via FFXIV Explorer.