In this MP you will
This MP is elective, with no core components. It assumes you have already completed the Flight MP.
You will submit a webpage that has
Submit an HTML file and any number of js, glsl, json, css, and image files.
You are welcome to use a JavaScript math library, such as the one used in in-class examples or others you might know.
This MP is an extension of the Flight MP; it should have all the inputs, algorithms, and operations of that MP.
This MP requires that the camera never bank, always remaining right-side up.
This MP assumes you used the nice approach to flying and have the camera position as a known variable.
The camera should be kept a fixed height above the terrain, close enough that nearby triangles take up a significant part of the field of view. It should also translate slowly enough that it takes several frames to move from one vertex of the terrain to another.
The recommend approach to this is to do the following every frame:
To find the height of the terrain at some world position, you should use inverse bilinear interpolation on the grid of heights you used to create the terrain. The point-to-grid-coordinate transformation is the inverse of whatever math you use to convert grid cell coordinates to vertex positions when creating the grid.
We do not require any specific behavior when the camera is off the grid except that the program not crash; it should either keep the camera on the grid or let it return to the grid later in the program’s execution.
In class we implemented Blinn’s optimization of specular lighting where we treated the halfway vector (or equivalently the direction to the eye) as fixed for all fragments in the scene. That works well when the scene objects are relatively far from the camera, but less well when the camera is up close to them.
For this assignment, compute per-fragment directions to the eye by interpolating the world coordinate of the triangle to each fragment and computing the direction to the eye from that position and the position of the eye.
On both your development machine and when submitted to the submission server and then viewed by clicking the HTML link, the resulting page should show the camera resting on a random terrain. When keys are held down the camera should drive across the terrain, rising and falling smoothly as it moves along sloped terrain. Specular highlights should react to camera location, not its orientation, which will be particularly noticeable in small motions having large impact on nearby highlights but less impact on distant highlights. One example might be the following: