· Animated Fractal Lightning Storm

· Ben Greenwood

· Computer Graphics II - 4003.571.01

· Professor - Nan C. Schaller

· http://lags.leetcode.net/cg2.html

· I would like to create an animated scene depicting a lightning storm using fractals. The scene will involve terrain, clouds, and lightning, all which will be generated by fractal methods. In particular, I am looking to use Brownian Motion to generate the lightning, and Midpoint Displacement for the terrain and clouds. The scene will be animated; the lightning will be generated continuously throughout the program's execution and strike at random within the scene.

· Project Objectives

• Construct an algorithm to produce a fractal height field for the terrain
• Construct an algorithm to generate a cloud texture
• Construct an algorithm to generate interesting looking lightning.
• Display and animate the scene by continuously generating new lighting and having it strike within the scene.

· System and Software – I will develop the software on a windows based machine using OpenGL.

· Project Components:

• Display Window: The program will simply display the scene onscreen when run, there will be no GUI interaction.

· Project Timeline – I will have the basic scene structure done by week 6 (initial terrain, clouds, and lightning generation methods). I will use the remaining time to work on animating the scene and adding additional details, such as terrain texturing, and tweaking the fractal methods to make the scene more visually appealing.

· Final Presentation – I will discuss the various fractal methods & graphical techniques I used to create the scene, any difficulties or interesting aspects I had during the project, and finally either run the program or display a recording of the animation.