About Me

My name is Galen Cochrane. My passion is creation. I've found outlets for that passion during my education in Physics and Computer Science. Among these outlets are projects in Computer Graphics, Data Science, and Simulation. I use this site to display a few of these that fit conveniently into a webpage, or to talk about those that don't. I'm currently looking for new opportunities to work with other creators and engineers on the technology of tomorrow.

2015 WebGL Demos

Some of these have texture rendering issues on macOS and iOS, but I don't own any apple hardware with which to test them. I haven't implemented any loading screens, so you may have to wait a few seconds for some of the textures to load. In short, these demos are most likely to work in Chrome or Firefox running Linux or Windows.

Billiards

Instructions: Left-click-drag (or double-touch-drag) to shoot. Right-click-drag (or touch-drag) to orbit, scroll (or pinch) to zoom. Zoomed view re-focuses on cue ball every time all the balls come to a stop.

Realtime Raytracer

Planet Shader

Now with animated weather

Instructions: Click-drag to rotate view. Scroll to zoom. Or use arrow keys to pan/zoom. Spacebar pauses/unpauses the animation. Use [ and ] to decrease or increase animation speed.

Credits for Earth texture go to Humus

Motion Capture Playback

Projects

2019 Ray-based Voxel Engine

An ongoing hobby project to simulate real-time editable voxel worlds with increasingly small voxels. Voxels are not meshed, and no triangles are used in this graphics pipeline. Fully volumetric games and simulations are the future. It runs on C++ and Vulkan.

2017 PBR Vulkan Game Engine

Another ongoing hobby project to make a game that takes place inside a spinning cylindrical colony ship (like Arthur C. Clarke's Rama), running in a custom homemade engine written in C++. Kindly ignore the ugly stretched dev textures and placeholder assets for now.

The physics of artificial spin-gravity combined with a small constant acceleration due to engine thrust produce a unique interior environment for the cylinder, where floor surfaces are sloped along parabolic curves.

2016 Real-time LiDAR Terrain Mapping

I got to work on a research project out of Idaho State University with the goal of mapping terrain using a drone equipped with a LiDAR sensor. I worked with the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and the LOAM algorithm, a variant of SLAM. I also got to help put together the embedded systems that would run our software. I had a lot of fun with it, and was able to present our research at three different statewide conferences. Funding came in part from the NSF Idaho EPSCoR Program and by the National Science Foundation under award number IIA-1301792.

2016 Dynamic LOD Procedural Terrain

2017 Genetic Algorithm To Develop Neural Nets For Simulated Navigation In A 3D Environment

Vehicles are trained to navigate towards targets in a physics simulation on 3D terrain. This was part of an independent study on artificial intelligence taken as C.S. coursework.

Pictures Pending Review

2014 Asteroids, But Using Only Windows' Form-Drawing API (GDI)

This project was actually an assignment for an undergraduate CS class, and I ended up pouring a lot more time into it than I needed to. It works surprisingly well, as long as you remember to build it with optimizations turned on.

2014 3D Rendering Engine Using GDI

After writing the asteroids game, I wanted to see if GDI could handle 3D built on top of it. GDI can fill triangles, and using only that capability, I wrote a realtime 3D sofware rendering engine that supports dynamic objects, dynamic point lights, Gouraud shading, visibility culling techniques, and a few other bells and whistles. It was a fun way to learn the math involved in 3D rendering.