CAPSTONE JOURNAL

Lanz Singbeil

Week 8

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For our prototype I used Blender3d and Blender's game engine to design and implement a 3d environment with fireflies and a tree who's 5 branches fall off corresponding to the arrow keys 1-5.

The fireflies are attracted to the location of branches and react when they fall off. They also go to sleep on the branches during the day.

The movements of the fireflies were inspired by shane's processing applet.

Getting the fireflies to behave properly took a bit of doing. What was perhaps more challenging was getting the movements to look nice and seem natural. For example, at first they all responded to the same stimuli at the same time (such as when day becomes night) so I had to add in a random delay for many of the different behaviours.

The day/night cycle and the clouds were modified from 2 existing open source demos.