Metamorphosis of three-dimensional objects is extremely popular in the movie industry, appearing in such films as The Matrix Reloaded (Warner Bros, 2003). To date, however, there are very few solutions which could duplicate these morphing effects in real time for use in computer gaming. The entertainment industry is a multi-billion pound sector and the gaming market alone is projected to be worth a staggering £32.4 billion by 2011 (Reuters, 2007). A real-time morphing solution has the potential to produce new game effects, making a game more exciting, and leading to better sales. This project addresses that challenge.
Figure 1.1 Morphing from a monkey head to a torus. Only a few of the in-between frames are shown.
The developed morphing solution produces morphs between two arbitrary three-dimensional objects, each represented by a surface of connected triangles, as shown in Figure 1.1. Any two objects can be chosen and the complexity of the objects does not affect the performance of the morphing system. Mid-morph objects are possible by supplying multiple objects to the system. Figure 1.2 gives an example of how this functionality can be used to create melting style transitions. Allowing flexibility to alter transition effects simply without the need of understanding the underlying morphing system keeps the system easy to adopt and simple to incorporate into a game.
Figure 1.2 Morphing from a penguin to a torus via an intermediate puddle-shaped meta-object.
The main principles used listed below, further information on how these are used can be found in the dissertation available here:
- Parallel Processing – Using CUDA.
- Voxelised World Space.
- Metaball Volumetric Influence Calculations.
- Marching Cubes Geometric Skin Generation.
Though the project dissertation has been completed, Figure 1.3 shows a video which shows the generated morph, and gives an overview of the system. The dissertation is currently being continued to attain better results, these alterations can be followed in the development blog.
figure 1.3 Video showing current progress of the system, offering a full overview of the system.
