Kearwood Gilbert

Welcome to the site of Kearwood Gilbert

iOS Development - PSSM (Parallel Split Shadow Mapping) and DOF (Depth of Field)

Posted Mon, 09/12/2011 - 12:32am

I am continuing work on my custom, from-scratch, game engine for iPhone, iPod, and iPad. It is a great challenge to implement the various shader paths and allow the engine to scale up and down to accomodate variations in CPU, GPU, memory limitations, and scene complexity.

The iPad 2's A5 chip could be used for a real competitor to the XBOX 360 and PS3. It has proven to be capable of rendering PSSM (Parallel Split Shadow Mapping) and DOF (Depth of Field) in real-time. It makes me wonder if an A5 based Apple TV will have official support for Bluetooth gaming peripherals.

For a some more teaser screenshots of my rendering engine, please click "read more" below...

Vancouver Japan Relief Walk of Hope

On April 3rd, 2011 the vancouver community joined together to assist the people in Japan who have lost their homes, family members, friends and lives from the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The participants raised over $5700 through the Canadian Red

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Premiere CS5 Endless Conforming Fix

Posted Sun, 01/30/2011 - 2:50pm

The Setup...

I capture video in HDV format, which uses compressed audio. When importing these clips into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, the video gets "indexes" and the audio gets "conformed". Conforming audio essentially involves decompressing it and stretching it out to 32-bit samples that are more efficient for non-linear editing. These 32-bit samples are stored in Adobe's proprietary CFA files that are either stored with your source clips or in a subdirectory of your home directory.

IOS Development - Specular and Normal mapping

Posted Tue, 01/11/2011 - 1:31am

I have succeeded in getting normal mapping and specular mapping working on the iPad and iPhone 4! The tangent vectors are calculated on the CPU and interleaved with the vertex coordinates, texture coordinates, and surface normals as VBO objects.

Frame rate is starting to drop below 30fps with one model, so need to work on optimization, texture compression, and LOD algorithms. Perhaps I can also combine the normal map and the specular map together as well.

I learned a lot from these sites while making it work:
http://www.terathon.com/code/tangent.html

Audio: Katak Bernyanyi (Singing Frogs After the Rain)

The night after a stormy day in Jaruban, East Java, Indonesia, the frogs (Katak) came out to sing. I was surprised how loud they are -- we don't have any sound like this in British Columbia, Canada. I walked out at night to take a recording to share and remember this sound…

Recorded in Jaruban, East Java, Indonesia in 2010. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

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Penjual Mie Goreng (Fried Noodle Cart)

Street food in Indonesia is often much better than in any restaurant. The owner of this "Penjual Mie Goreng" (Fried Noodle Cart) prepares hand made noodles with his own, top secret recipe.

Special thanks to the cook and all of our family and friends in Indonesia.

Recorded in Kudus, Central Java, Indonesia in 2010. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

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iOS Development - Texture Manager

Posted Thu, 10/14/2010 - 11:33pm

I'm writing a texture manager class for iOS... This iPad is more powerful than the last PC that I had coded OpenGL on!

Here's a teaser screenshot... The model was loaded from Lightwave .obj format directly on the iPad with the textures compressed in the PVR native format.

Next up, bump mapping and dynamic lights!

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Yogyakarta Batik

This is a batik workshop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The gamelan music was recorded from a live performance by the "Paguyuban Seni Karawitan".

Filmed with a Canon XHA1s and edited in Adobe Premiere CS4.

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Amazon EC2 Cloud Advice

Posted Wed, 07/07/2010 - 10:52pm

Amazon EC2 Cloud Advice of the day...

Convert your EC2 instance storage instances to EBS root storage before your node spontaneously becomes unresponsive... Merging an AMI with EBS data volumes during mission-critical downtime is not fun!

- Kearwood

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Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud)

Posted Sat, 08/15/2009 - 1:57am

I have moved the server for this site over to Amazon's EC2 Cloud Computing Environment. The new server has about 10 times the bandwidth as my DSL line. The videos should play a lot smoother now.

This comes after my last commercial project, virtualizing an ISV's complete development and production environments. The costs of the Amazon hosting was mostly offset by the power and cooling costs saved when decommissioning the old physical infrastructure.