marco's blog

intro

marco — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:00:20 +0000

This page shows a subset of my projects, which I’ve created in my spare time and during my studies. Please note that I’m not able to provide the source code to all of the binaries, as I’ve lost some of it due to a hard disk crash (sounds like a lame excuse, but if you donate the money I’ll be glad to have it restored ). The graphics library of choice has been OpenGL so far and a lot of external libraries have been used for implementation (Ogre, ODE, PhysX, GLUI, QT, SDL etc.).

Currently I am digging into the XNA framework to use for newer projects, as I bought myself a XBox360 .

cggame

marco — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:57:24 +0000

This was our (Christian Eisenacher, a fellow student back then, and me) contribution to a game themed seminar. Our task was to implement the lightmap calculation and stencil shadowing on the GPU on a customized version of the Quake3 source code. Unfortunately scribd did not make an excellent job at transforming the PowerPoint slides, but as you can see on slide nr. 9, our method was very fast and the resulting lightmaps comparable to those rendered offline. It might now even be possible on current hardware to recalculate those with some tweaks in realtime …

[Show as slideshow]

intro

marco — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:04:11 +0000

I was born at the very beginning of the 80’s in a beautiful city called Nuremberg, Germany, located in the heart of Europe. Raised and educated in the same town, I got my MSc in Computer Science (Diplom Informatiker) at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg in December 2005.

I have been working for the Ericsson Prototype Unit in Nuremberg since March 2006 until March 2009, where we were developing IMS based communication services (voice and video over IP, filetransfer and text messaging) to showcase the performance of the next telecom standard called LTE, which is being developed there, too.

After a long and amazing vacation in the USA throughout April 2009 I am now looking for a challenging new job in the London area.

Skills:

Programming Languages: C/C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python
Graphics Libraries: OpenGL, Microsoft DirectX, Intel IPL/IPP/OpenCV, Ogre
Shading Languages: GLSL, Cg, HLSL, Renderman Shading Language
Technologies: Trolltech Qt, Open Inventor, Microsoft XNA
Applications: MS Visual Studio, Eclipse, Vim, Microsoft Office, Open Office
Content Creation: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds MAX, Gimp
Revision Control: ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, Git
Operating Systems: Unix, Linux, MS Windows NT/2000/XP
Languages: German (fluent), English(fluent), French (not so fluent)

CV:

2006 - 2009
Software Design Engineer, Ericsson GmbH Prototype Unit
2005
Diploma in Computer Science (cf. M.Sc. Computer Science) at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg
2001 - 2005
Research assistant at the chair of pattern recognition
1999
Microsoft Road Ahead Prize (2nd place nation-wide)
1999
Highschool and A-levels

Interests:

Enjoy game and graphics programming
Play video games (e.g. adventures, platformers, action-adventures)
Enjoy travelling foreign countries. Travelled throughout Scotland in 2006, went backpacking in Thailand in 2007, went snorkelling in the Maldives in 2008, 4 weeks travelling in the USA in April 2009 and several short trips to London, Paris and Berlin during the last years.
Play soccer passionately as an active member in the sports club ASC Boxdorf since 1986
Web master of the website of the soccer team the “Torpedos” (www.torpedos-neunhof.de)
Love watching films (e.g. fantasy, independent, animated)

CV

marco — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:34:20 +0000

This is my current CV:

diploma thesis

marco — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:21:44 +0000

Below you can find my diploma thesis titled “Augmented Reality for Stereo-Endoscopic Systems”, which is about augmented reality and its appliance in the medical area. I have developed a system for real-time depth calculation based on a stereo endoscopic image pair and the augmentation of previously captured 3d organs. Unfortunately the thesis itself is only available in german, but maybe the english abstract and the pictures are interesting for non-german folks too (I think the picture on page 57 before chapter “3.2 Rendering” summarizes it quite good; see the can being rendered with and without depth information)

study thesis

marco — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:27:01 +0000

Below you can find my study thesis, which is a prerequisite to be allowed to write the diploma thesis. It is about “Procedural Landscape Models based on Cellular Texture Functions” (basically procedural real-time generation of Worley textures), which can be used for a variety of effects and texture generation. I did a solely GPU based implementation back in 2003, which was computing the textures some magnitutes faster than the CPU based version. Back then no CUDA or similar API was available

Unfortunately it is only available in german, but the pictures should allow some insight to practical applications of this technique.

penga

marco — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:12:58 +0000

This has been my first attempt at using Ogre in conjunction with the Novodex physics library. The gameplay is similar to Jenga, you can push and pull the stones by clicking and holding the left and right mouse buttons, but don’t let the tower collapse!

The game itself has not been finished due to the HD accident, it lacks highscore and all the multiplayer components, but it still makes fun to watch the scenery (butterflies and environmental effects) and throw around stones.

But you can download and try it yourself!

And “good news, everyone” I found an old backup of the sources for this one, but it does not contain the linked libraries nor the versions of the external libraries I have used. In order to get it compiling you have to get Ogre, the Gangsta-Wrapper, OpenAL and OIS. The source code comes with no warranties, but please feel free to download (and keep in mind that it was never to be released in that shape …)!

[Show as slideshow]

pathfinder

marco — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:57:13 +0000

This program served as a research facility to test some pathfinding algorithms. You can set the obstacles, traversal costs and start / end positions.

Please download, unzip and run PathFinder.exe!

interpolations

marco — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:09:32 +0000

I made this little project to test the various interpolation methods I have been taught in one of my cg university lessons. It contains linear, bezier-curve, b-spline interpolation and some other methods to lay curve through a set of control points. You can set and move the points and alter the different parameters.

Please download this file, extract it and start InterpolationMethods.exe.

psycho cubes

marco — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:06:32 +0000

This was just a little test to recreate an interesting effect I saw in a demo on pouet.net, but additionaly it has been my first attempt to investigate into render-to-texture algorithms; the animations for the different cubes are calculated recursevily.

Enough talking, download, unzip, maximize and start staring!

x-mas winamp plugin

marco — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 14:22:10 +0000

This is a winamp plugin, made for a contest at NeHe’s website. It made second place and features a dancing santa, reindeer, a christmas tree, a snowman and loads more ;). The signs, arms, legs, bulbs (…) are animated to the music in realtime, but the beat-detection is rather clumsy (just tried it with the newest Portishead album and can verify that it still works on Winamp 5.35!).

Please download this file and extract the contents of the /bin directory to your winamp/plugin directory.

scorchtris

marco — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 15:02:08 +0000

This game was the final project of a practical graphics lecture I took at during my studies. Our task was to implement a game /application /whatsoever of our choice and fulfil our own set goals in a given timeframe. I decided to implement some sort of multiplayer tetris over network where you earn bullets for clearing lines and shoot them at the opposing players games in order to make ugly holes in their board. As networking library I took my homebrew CORBA like RPC software, which I have implemented in a previous distributed systems lecture, the graphics part is implemented with OpenGL and as the physics library of choice I used ODE.

You can download this piece of software in two variants: one for Windows and the other one for Linux (be warned, this has not been tested for a long time).

raytracer

marco — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 14:20:29 +0000

This is my first raytracer which is capable of raytracing the most basic primitives (spheres, planes and triangle). It was finished in a quite short amount of time and has been extended/refined all the time with stuff like surface shaders, bounding sphere hierarchies, OpenGL scene preview etc.

Unfortunately there is no binary to download this time , but you can watch the gallery instead (hooray!).

[Show as slideshow]

simple menu

marco — Fri, 02 Jan 2004 14:03:43 +0000

Ok, this is nothing special, but I needed a simple library with almost no dependencies to other libraries (except OpenGL, to be honest). It features menu entries (woot), numerical spinners, checkboxes and some other stuff, which can be stacked, linked and combined. All widgets provide callbacks and support live update of variables. I needed it for some of my university projects and even some of my fellow students used it for their projects.

terrain renderer

marco — Sat, 11 Jan 2003 14:17:49 +0000

This program has been one of my first steps in the area of graphics programming. Inspired by one of my lectures in realtime graphics held by Prof. Marc Stamminger I had to implement this humble approach ;). The terrain is generated from a color texture and the stencil shadow volumes are being calculated in realtime. You can move the light source and alter a lot of parameters. I implemented some sort of normal-clustering to speed up the computation of the shadow volumes.

You can try it yourself if you download this zipped file shadowedterrain.zip (unzip and run ShadowedTerrain.exe).

For the not so brave (or for those who didn’t have the time to spare, or …) a small gallery can be found below.

[Show as slideshow]

halo wallpaper

marco — Thu, 01 Mar 2001 16:27:52 +0000

This is a slight off-topic post, but I just found this picture on a very old hd. It shows a desktop wallpaper I made back in 2001 for a wallpaper contest for the german PC Games magazine. It won me a lot of stuff back then, including a mouse I’m currently using to layout this post … Funny thing about it: the pictures you are seeing were from the PC version of HALO, which PC release date was delayed in favor of the XBox version , but the contest was held for the PC version before the delay announcement and … awh, forget it and enjoy the picture