Beta Review and Future Plans

I had my Beta Review with Norm and Joe on Friday, and I'd say it went over pretty well. I implemented Norm's suggestion on color-coding building footprints to determine the generated structure type, as well as importing external Maya ASCII files into the library of available assets. Results-wise, I was able to generate a city with multiple building types as well as trees (imported Maya ASCII files), which I was pretty happy about.

The Beta Review also gave me some ideas to work on the next few weeks. One was finding a rectangle that can fit completely within a convex polygon. Prior to this, I was generating each footprint by shrinking the bounding box of its containing face by a random value, but in some cases (such as when the polygon is a triangle), the resulting footprint can still fall outside of the face. Another feature we thought of during the review was to subdivide a face into smaller components so the user can generate multiple smaller assets close together.

With the end of the semester coming close, here is a list of features I'm working on having done in the next few weeks:


Must

• Generate a GUI for the users
• Implement rectangle generation within convex polygon feature
• Implement face subdivision
• Refine building structures

Optional

• Implement user import of assets (as part of the GUI)
• Add additional building types

Dec 4 - 10

• Implement rectangle in convex polygon
• Implement face subdivision

Dec 11-17

• Refine building structures
• Create GUI

Dec 17-21

• Finish optional implementations if time permits
• Movie presentation