Jyhtar Chong
Haye Chan
CS 418 Final Project (1998)
An asteroid a mile wide flies across space heading towards Earth. It penetrates the atmosphere near the east coast of the North American continent. Meanwhile, it is a bright and sunny day in bustling New York City. Then, all of a sudden, the sky darkens after a thunderous boom. Falling from the sky is the burning asteroid.
The asteroid hits the sea near downtown Manhanttan, creating a tsunami that almost floods the city. A powerful earthquake soon occurs. Even the tallest buildings cannot withstand the tremor. The two World Trade Center buildings collapse, crumbling into pieces. The Empire State Building explodes dramatically due to a bomb planted by terrorists years ago, which has remained unexploded until this earthquake.
Due to the instability of the geological structure after the impact, the whole Manhattan peninsula sinks into a legend...
The title page has 2 parts - the first one with a line of flame burning up to reveal the word "Armageddon", and the second one with a bigger flame burning up to reveal our names, school, course title, and copyright.
The flame is a cellular automaton texture simulating burning fire. Associated with each cell is a color code which ranges from 0 to 127, 0 representing black and 127 bright yellow, with red and orange in between. The rule for this CA is:
Since a cell depended on 3 neighbors and 1 non-neighbor, we used 2 filters in DX, one to sum up the cells, and one to shift the result up.
An asteroid flies across space, heading towards Earth. Is this the Armageddon?
The Earth is actually a map of the world (with some clouds added using Photoshop) parametrically warped into a sphere. The moon is done similarly. The stars are just random white dots on a plane warped into a hemisphere. The asteroid body is an ellipsoid parametrically deformed to make it look like a smooth stone. The color on it is a volume texture map. The asteroid's tail is a collection of 3 paraboloids, each having a volume texture map that depends on time, making the asteroid appear to be flying across the space. The opacities of the tail decreases towards its end according to an inverse square law.
The camera first views the peaceful Earth. Then it zooms away from it. Suddenly, an asteroid flies out from nowhere, heading towards Earth. The camera chases the asteroid, then stops and starts zooming in on Earth before the impact.
The asteroid hits on the waters right beside Manhattan, and dust from the asteroid spread over the atmosphere. The whole sky is covered with dust and the whole city goes into darkness.
The following is a description of the techniques used in this scene:
The Landscape
The fractal landscape is constructed by scientific visualization randomly. Appropiate initial fractal values are given, then the fractals are refined level by leve. Many seeds are tried until we get a landscape which looks like Manhattan.
World Trade Center
Main Surface is a texture map using a mod function over x and z components to get the "window" effects. Other parts are mainly constructed by vertices and faces list
The Empire State Building
It consists of several "blocks" with the same texture. First we compute all the color at each point by some mod function, then we use the Glyph module to form the actual texture. The needle above is a parametrically defined surface.
Other small buildings
After we include the points above a certain water level, we construct cubes on those points on the landscape surface by Glyph on random data, i.e. size. We repeat that for three times with different cube sizes on the same random data. Then we scale these glyphs vertically (smalle cubes scale higher) to make the buildings look more interesting. Colors field is computed randomly within a certain small range of colors before passing to the Glyph module.
Water Waves
The water waves is generated by the method in Lab 10 - Physics based motion by partial differential equation. See the dynamics for detail explanation of the mathematics behind it.
Water Splashes
Water Splashes is another physics based motion generated with simple laws of mechanics. Initial horizontal velocities are radially outward perturbed randomly. Initial vertical velocities are randomly generated within a certain range.
The impact causes a powerful earthquake. The once tallest buildings in the world succumb to the tremor and crumbles into pieces...
The upper part of the building on the left falls to the ground by a series of rotations
and translations, while its lower part crumbles down, just like the building on the
right. The crumbling effect is created by changing the positions of the cubic glyphs
that made up the buildings. The size of the glyphs also becomes smaller with
time. The glyphs at the lower part of the building starts crumbling down before the
glyphs at the higher part do so. Gravity is simulated by factoring in
acceleration. Each glyph is also randomly perturbed along the vertical axis.
 |
 |
The earthquake has died down, but it has triggered off a bomb inside Empire State Building, which was placed by terrorists 10 years ago. They made a mistake and the bomb never got detonated, until now.
The powerful explosion of the Empire State building has glyph positions computed from forces thru physics law. Random but radially outward initial velocities is given again. Vertical velocities is given randomly with both positive and negative possibilities. The needle which falls down intact is animated by forward kinematics.
The underground geological structure of New York City is excited by the asteroid impact and becomes highly unstable. The whole city sinks into a legend......