Model Loader Added

After much searching and rejecting a few candidates that didn't integrate well with what I was trying to do, I finally found a model file parser that is suitable for my project. The loader is called "Assimp: Open Asset Import Library," and can be found at: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/. I've included a screenshot showing the street scene from our 3rd homework assignment with a spider model added to it. The image was generated using a simple shader that just outputs the view-space normals as a color. The spider model was included in the assimp download package.

One neat thing about assimp is that it can import a huge variety of file formats, which should allow me to find some interesting geometry to use in my project. As of now, the program only uses the position and normal data to build objects, but I plan to also include support for different materials, textures, and vertex color data for untextured models. I'm not a huge fan of the included model because it includes a split down the center of the face.

My next step will be to implement some kind of singleton objects for managing shader and texture pools and editing the forward renderer to support an arbitrary number of lights (through a multi-pass approach). I also need to set up a system to include simple animation in the scene (probably entire objects moving in circular paths). Once those tasks have been completed, I can finally begin working on the tile-based deferred rendering.

The plan is to implement tiling for both lighting and post-processing. For the lighting stage, the entire light calculation will probably be done in a CUDA kernel. I was looking at an implementation for tile-based lighting in directX (available here), and noticed that it relied entirely on the directX computer shader. Since openGL doesn't yet support anything similar as far as I have been able to tell, it will be necessary to use CUDA instead. For the post-processing, my approach will be somewhat different. The tile classification will still occur in CUDA; however, rendering to the framebuffer will be done by a series of calls to all of the possible shader combinations. Using 4 or 5 post-processing effects will require 16 or 32 shaders to account for all combinations; the shaders will be permuted from an uber-shader using preprocessor defines.