Street Fighter IV is out. I don’t have it yet. I’m not very good at it so I’ll wait for the price to drop. Too many $60 games out there and I haven’t even finished GTA4 yet after starting in May 2008. Ouch. SFIV caught my eye in an early screenshot that was very confusing. It was a grid level of some kind. I mean, the walls and floor looked like graph paper. Awesome!

For some reason, I’m a sucker for grid patterns in 3d. I don’t know why. Maybe it started with the amiga 500. I remember their logo was this 3d red and white checkerball. The amiga logo a reference to 3D rendering. The checkerboard is like the basic of basics in computer graphics. You put a 3D ball on a checkboard plane and the 3d effect is clearly visible. Each block further from the focal point is distorted by perspective. You can look at each red and white block and clearly see the effect. The middle blocks on the ball are undistorted while the edge blocks hardly look like squares.

It’s just something I find interesting. When I see the Amiga ball, I get a feeling of “the test render is the final render”. The Amiga can do 3D. It’s already there. It’s just up to you to extend it. To me, the test ball is beautiful. It already has delivered.

I used to talk to this hobbyist 3D developer in Arlington. His name is Shamyl Zakariya. He’s a goddamn genius. He wrote this test app (among a million other things) that moved an inchworm model around in a 3d space. His 3d space was a big box with graph-paper type textures for the floor, walls and ceiling. He didn’t need to put textures up to do his test and procedurally creating grid lines is pretty easy to do in code. For many of his test apps and initial builds, he’d just render some grid lines all over the place. It’s not only fast and easy but it also can help with counting placement or measuring distances (like the ruler in Photoshop). Eventually he would replace the grids with textures and the illusion would be covered with something more realistic. How similar to SFIV’s training mode.

Fast forward many years later when I run into a Java based raytracer called sunflow. It’s got a processing library project called p5sunflow. Sunflow is a bit early on in its development and I was curious to see what people have done with it (if anything). I was checking out the gallery when I ran into a very familiar graph paper type 3d space that looks almost exactly like SFIV’s training mode. Note the wall at the back of the “room” and how similar it is to the SFIV room. I wonder what kind of approximation they used for the curve points? I wonder how much the level of detail was toyed with to make it look curved? I wonder if I could render a room like this?

The raytraced picture has the lovely advantage of depth of field. The blurring of the grid lines really make for a penciled graph paper look. Very nice with the lighting too. But then that’s exactly what rasterizing can’t do. But then there are no realtime raytracing apps yet.

So there’s my weird meme of grids that started many years ago. At least I’ve put this idea into a condensed post that I can point to if I ever get stuck trying to explain this to someone. And even then it probably won’t make any sense. But that’s ok.