This is an archive of my old blog (2008–2013), kept online because people still use it. XNA has been discontinued; MonoGame is its open-source successor, and the techniques still apply. Comments are closed.

School Projects with XNA

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This semester at the university, we had a Graphics Processing Systems class. While old fixed-function OpenGl was used in courses and laboratory works, for the project, I chose to use my favorite graphics API in the whole world. Yup, you know what I'm talking about... the XNA Framework.

A few of my friends also got dragged into XNA, based on my two years of talking about how cool it is. Neither of them had any previous XNA experience, so I guided them to some tutorials and the creator's club site and let them experience it from there. Also, popular request from them sparked the idea of an easy to use shadows library.

Godswood

From all the projects I've seen made, the one that I am most proud of is that of my beloved iubi-pufi-honey-bunny (read fiancee), Lidia. She made a great tree model inspired by George R. R. Martin's works, all from scratch, and placed some mountains and water around it. After adding some falling snow, she decided to make the snow accumulate on the ground and trees, and came up with the idea to do some simple shader tricks and blend in the snow texture based on the time passed since the snow began to fall. The result looks very nice. Check it out for yourself, by downloading the binaries. (control the camera with directional keys and mouse, use [S] to toggle snow)

Godswood 2008-06-05 23-18-16-73 Godswood 2008-06-05 23-18-29-30

Godswood 2008-06-05 23-17-40-80

Island in the Ocean

For my project, I decided to try and implement Atmospheric Scattering and realistic water rendering. For atmospheric scattering, I learned from Javier Canton Ferrero's sample. For realistic water rendering, I read, studied and converted to XNA Yuri Kryachko's article from GPU Gems 2, "Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering". My palm trees were modeled by Lidia.

You can see the results below, and download the binaries here.

Use the gamepad, or keyboard+mouse for camera control. [Space] pauses the simulation, and [S] speeds it up.

image003 image004

image001

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Categorized: XNA

17 comments on “School Projects with XNA”

  1. Very nice! I like the shader you've got on that water - classy =)

    Does that water run on the Xbox? Does it run well if so?

    I also liked the accumulation of the snow - simple, but very powerful.

  2. I didn't actually try running the water on the Xbox, but there should be no problem. It uses Vertex Texture Fetch, which I know works just fine on the Xbox.

  3. Godswood - Seems to me shadows are facing towards the lighting ?

    Could be me that is wrong, or its intentional, dunno :)

  8. The water technique is based on this article, which explains it pretty well:

    http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/GPU_Gems2_ch18.pdf

    Also, you can download their original sample, with source code here:

    http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/CD/Content/18.zip

  9. Hi Catalin,

    i can't get the Godswood app to run... what SM version does the app require? what xna runtime version? I've installed the XNA 2.0 runtime, the gc supports SM2.0.

  11. Since my last post i had the possibity to try to run the demo on other systems. Turns out that it didn't even run on SM 4.0 hardware (in fact, it didn't start on *any* system i tried to run it). It's always the same: "FileNotFoundException". What file was missing it wouldn't tell, though....

  12. That's odd.. I tried running it on several machines, with various cards, ranging from GeForce 6600, 7300, 8600 and 8800, and I encountered no problem.

    Do other XNA apps run on the other systems?

  16. Hi there,

    I've downloaded this file (http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/CD/Content/18.zip), but it's not working with xna 3.1 I think. Any help? Thanks

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