MONASH UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
HONOURS YEAR

FIT4012 : Procedural modelling, animation
& artificial life in computer graphics

Assignment Notes


Title :

Gormenghast

Date Due: Refer to main page
Weight: 100% of your final mark for this unit
Submission: CD/DVD-ROM

 

Specifications:

The castle of Gormenghast is a massive, sprawling location ruled over by the House of Groan. Its countless coridoors and halls, towers, walls and pillars are the home of Titus Groan, a restless Earl. Titus rebels against the law of his forefathers which would have him spend his days adhering to centuries old, unchanging rituals until the day he dies. His castle is occupied by numerous weird and gothic characters. Where uninhabited, its stairwells have become chocked with the debris of years, its walls smothered in ivy. Trees poke from nooks and crannies in the crumbling masonry. Shrubs and brambles have filled gates and courtyards.

The castle has inspired many artists since the book's publication. It is your task to reveal some of the complexity of Gormenghast in virtual form. The authoritative source of information is the Gormenghast trilogy of books, in particular the first two, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, authored by the English writer and illustrator, Mervyn Peake. These are available in the university library or even the secondhand bookshop. Extracts are available on a website devoted to the text. There is also a BBC series made of the texts, extracts of which are available on YouTube.

Focus on making an intricate, sprawling castle, or a more intimate setting within the castle walls (such as a single courtyard or stairwell) by employing the generative techniques discussed in lectures. The castle needs to be parameterised by (i) the number, form and arrangement of the towers, walls, pillars or stairs (ii) the locations of plants growing wild in and on the building. Use your imagaination! I.e. Different parameters specified at run-time (or read from a file) should produce different castle formations (E.g., If you want to work on courtyards, your parameters should build many different courtyards. If you want to build towers, walls and gates, your parameters should deal with the type and arrangements of these) with plants of different heights and in different locations.

A painting of Gormenghast by © Malcolm Brown (origin)
Illustration by Mervyn Peake of the mountain on which Gormenghast is situated.
Some random person's overgrown castle photos to get you inspired. Have a look also at some images of Angkor Wat for further ideas.
Image (from the BBC series) over the rooves of Gormenghast.  

Additional suggestions: Maybe procedural textures could be used to generate stone or brick surfaces. You might employ a technique to build a mountain landscape and position a castle around this. Your vision of Gormenghast will to some extent determine the most suitable modelling techniques.

All your code should be written in C or C++ and should run under a UNIX (or derivative) operating system. The models should be visualised in OpenGL. Either a camera path through your castle can be pre-programmed by you or it can be left under the control of a human user. Alternatively, a good camera position can be hard-coded. Any of these possibilities is acceptable as long as the castle is shown off well.

If you wish to get into the Hall-of-Fame here is something that might assist. Visualize your animated model by rendering a still image specified by a model file exported from your software. Use a stand-alone free/share-ware renderer such as POV-Ray to produce the rendering. It is worth scanning the POV-Ray gallery and Hall-of-Fame for ideas on how to use the modelling primitives the software can handle to generate landscapes containing buildings, plants, light sources etc. This rendering can be made after the project deadline if you desire as it will not be assessed.

Choose the features of the castle and grounds that most interest you and model them appropriately. You will need to research modelling techniques, especially those on generative architecture. This will involve reading papers and books, not just the WWW and the lecture notes. Prepare a bibliography document detailing the references you have consulted in the course of your research. Write a paragraph describing the contents of each reference you have consulted. The paragraph should be specific about what the reference contained that was of value (or not) for your assignment.

Marking breakdown:

Castle buildings & grounds [45]
Plants [45]
Bibliography: only published books, conference and journal papers count for marks. [10]

Bonus: the best images and extra features will receive some bonus marks as detailed below. Don't overdo it, your total mark is capped at 100.

A flock of crows or owls flying out of a turret or around the gardens [7]

<=10

Submission Details:

The assignment is due at the time specified on the main page.

Submit all of the files specified below on a CD/DVD-ROM clearly labelled with your name and ID number. Submissions will be accepted at the General Office in building 63 or presented in person to the lecturer prior to the deadline.

You will need to include the following in your submission:

Documentation is important. Marks are allocated within each section for the research you have done. Documentation submitted should include:

Each file of your source code must contain the follwing at the top:

 /* 
  * This software is the original work of <Your Full Name>. ID: <Your ID> 
  * This software is submitted in partial fulfillment of the 
  * requirements for the degree of <Your Degree>, 
  * Monash University
  */ 

You are encouraged to consult reference material as widely as possible, but remember the code you write MUST be your own work. Make sure you think about, and understand, the processes involved rather than blindly copying the work of others.

Please be realistic about what you can achieve given the time constraints. Students invariably spend far too much time on this assignment. As much fun as it is, any time above 50 hours would be better spent on other activities. (e.g. fishing in the Monash pond)

Late assignments will incur mark penalties according to the Fibonacci sequence multiplied by a lecturer-determined scaling factor (e.g. 0.5, 1 or 100). An assignment that is one day late will receive a one mark penalty multiplied by the scaling factor. Assignments two days late will receive a 2 mark penalty, three days late, 3 marks, each multiplied by the factor. The sequence is [1],1,2,3,5,8,13,21... (times the factor). This applies for all days including public holidays and weekends so please submit your assignments punctually!


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