Environment mapping & faster surface reconstruction

So I have finished putting in environment mapping - I might tweak the shader a bit more as right now I am doing 100% reflectivity whereas elemental mercury should be around 70%. However, I think the texture already goes a long way in help to sell the mercury effect.

Here's a quick vid of the classic glut teapot rendered with environment cube mapping


I have also gotten the improved algorithm to a more stable point. Unfortunately, it's still not real time for 100 particles, but I was at least able to visualize it at a sluggish .1 fps for 100 and realtime for 10 particles. Optimizing on my spatial hashing code should further speed up the algorithm. Also, I am going to try a quick change to the data structure storing the grid point to sample which should also result in a speedup (using a list instead of a set, creating it in linear time, then sorting in O(nlogn) and then iterating through and copying into a new list to get rid of duplicates.

Here's two videos demonstrating the real time 10-particle mercury and the 100-particle mercury sped up to real time.





Anyway, as you can see from the video, the more refined implicit surface reconstruction combo'd with the environment mapping goes a long in selling the material as mercury. Also, the volume introduced by the surface helps add to the surface tension-like blobbiness of the mercury by giving additional depth to the material.

Some sources that were a huge help in understanding environment mapping and actually getting glsl shaders to work:

http://elf-stone.com/glee.php
    -GLee for getting openGL extensions to work
http://www.lonesock.net/soil.html
    -SOIL for loading in cube maps
http://tfc.duke.free.fr/
    -a great environment mapping demo which was a huge help as a base for my code
http://www.lighthouse3d.com/tutorials/glsl-tutorial/?intro
    - a good intro to understanding glsl
http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/articles/article.asp?article=21
    - another thorough article on understanding glsl in general
http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/glsl_texturing_p04.php
    - a good environment cube mapping tutorial for glsl
a href="http://3dshaders.com/home/index.php?option=com_weblinks&catid=14&Itemid=34"
    - lots of glsl resources and shader code useful as a reference
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~hwshen/781/Site/Lab4.html
    - another helpful tutorial on setting up environment cube mapping in openGL/glsl
http://www.codemonsters.de/home/content.php?show=cubemaps
    - awesome resource for images to use in creating cube maps; currently I am using one of the ones from NVIDIA.

This will likely be my last post before the presentation and poster session on Thursday, as with Passover just ending, things have been really crazy and I'm still working on finishing up the poster and video and making some final tweaks before the presentation. As always, any comments or feedback is much appreciated!