Ideas for research module?

Teessider

Hi Polycount!

As most of you are in the industry and my research module is called "Contemporary Studies in Games", I thought I would come here to ask for ideas I could do for my studies (or a tutorial as we can do that as well!)

I'm on the Games Art pathway so my research will be geared towards what artists do but this module is quite open in terms of what we can research.

I already have some ideas:

I would really like to do a tutorial (I did a couple for my team in my last group project - https://vimeo.com/37906533 & https://vimeo.com/38023695 ) and I was thinking of doing a tutorial for nDo2 (being used in the process of creating DirectX 11 shaders in UDK) even though there are few out there now...thoughts? I was also thinking about doing a tutorial on implementing DirectX 11 shaders in either UDK/CryEngine 3 possibly?

For a study, I am thinking of looking at how weather affects the atmosphere/feel/look to the game?

Is anything you (as potential employers/current employees etc) would to see being researched/developed?

Ruz

how about 'hair', that's always worth a looksee, though it would require a lot of technical knowledge to add anyhting worthwhile

glottis8

Hair sounds good. I was just about to start looking at how to do good hair.

Teessider

Hair? That's an interesting idea. Could do fur/hair tutorial? (An advanced one obviously )

Eric Chadwick

That would be cool! We have some resources here, might give you some ideas.
http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique

passerby

Hair ad mentioned and foliage are good ones, also could trying looking into things like gradient mapping, or uv distortion/flowmaps

Steve Schulze

Flow-maps could be a valuable one as they're not yet a particularly well known or explored element and there'd still be plenty of folks (like me for instance) who don't really understand what they're all about.

Teessider

Jackablade wrote: »

Flow-maps could be a valuable one as they're not yet a particularly well known or explored element and there'd still be plenty of folks (like me for instance) who don't really understand what they're all about.

Flow-maps? I've never heard of them lol. I've just done a quick google search and it certainly interests me and it is something I could research :thumbup:

JohnnyRaptor

realtime hair, cloth and fluid dynamics for proper vfx (explosions, smoke etc) would be interesting stuff.

we see a lot of tech demos etc, but to actually implement a lot of that in a useful way in a real project with tons of characters on screen is usually a no no on current gen consoles.

but again, to do this stuff you would need to do a lot of research, do implementations in real world scenarios which will be difficult as a student. but worth a crack...

its not meant to be easy eh:)

Teessider

That does sound like a lot of research! but I'm still considering some ideas at the moment.

However, I am leaning toward the idea of researching flow maps and seeing if I can get them to work with DX11 tesselation maybe?