Well I like to check back in every now and then with some of the big players in the community to see what’s going on.
One of those players is Catalin Zima, who is famous for producing many great shader and effect samples.
One of Catalin’s reccent project particularly caught my eye however as I had tried to tackle the same problem several years ago when I was in my final year of university. That is, Dynamic 2D Shadows Calculated on the GPU (http://mikecann.co.uk/university-projects/shadowshader-in-rendermonkey/)
Catalin’s approach to the problem is far more elegant that my brute force iterative approach. He uses a clever technique of distorting the desired casting image about the light in such a way as not to require iterative pixel lookups.
I just realised some of my old XNAGPUParticles project videos have gone walkies. So I have reposted them on youtube. These are my old projects from my final year of uni, binary and source code can be found in the relevant post for each video.
I got bored of revision for my final exam so i decided to play around with my XNAGPUParticles abit more and came up with this thing.
Basically it takes a texture and picks out pixel colours from the texture and maps it onto a large vertex buffer which then is used as the input to my Vetex Texture particle system.
I have made a few adjustments to the way the vertex texture system works, now each particle has its own centre of gravity that it revolves about.
This is the video of the XNAGPUParticles project i have uploaded for those peeps who doent have the requirements to run it but want to check it out anyways.
This is another submission of work i have done in my final year. This time the project is all my own work.
The project is a continuation based on work from before Christmas and is an experiment into state preserving particle systems. I started out with examining the basic particle systems such as a static system and one that updates on the CPU. I then moved onto more advanced systems such as the GPU based system described by Lance Latta and others. I soon discovered however that XNA doesn’t support “uber buffers” and as such had to invent a new solution using vertex textures. The result is a particle system written in XNA that is able to update and render 1,000,000 particles at about 22 frames a second with 4 forces.
To view this demo you first need to have the XNA runtimes. If you dont have those just go HERE.
This is my second dabble in HLSL and this time it was just for personal reasons. I wanted to create a shadow effect for a 2D game that we are developing for our group project. Its actually very hard to find any resources on the internet about this but i did stumble accross one resource (which i have now lost the link to) where someone has created a basic shadow effect purely in shaders.
So i decided to have a go and this was the outcome. In the end however its too slow to be used in the game but serves as a usfull learning tool when the hardware catches up.
To view this you will need to download RenderMonkey.
Well in my final year at university we have been working on shaders. I decided to concentrate on particles as it ties in nicely with my final project (more on that to come).
This is my first little dabble with the excellent shader creation tool, RenderMonkey. To view this you will need to download the free app.
This was acually a peice of work for one of my modules so the .zip file contains the written report too.
This is another submission of work i have done in my final year. This time the project is all my own work.
This is my second dabble in HLSL and this time it was just for personal reasons. I wanted to create a shadow effect for a 2D game that we are developing for our group project. Its actually very hard to find any resources on the internet about this but i did stumble accross one resource (which i have now lost the link to) where someone has created a basic shadow effect purely in shaders.
Well in my final year at university we have been working on shaders. I decided to concentrate on particles as it ties in nicely with my final project (more on that to come). 
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.