[O][D][D]Saur stands for the Opensource Digital Dinosaur. ODDSaur is a binary-coded  theropod that probably lived 65 million clock cycles ago in some home PC. The ODDSaur Project was started by me, Chong Jiayi, out of boredom and the need to give my Geforce card something to do (as opposed to sitting in my computer and doing nothing).

The original inspiration behind ODDSaur came about after watching the fantastic DINOSAUR television series by the BBC. I thought that it would be rather cool to be able to create a digital dinosaur that could run, breathe and wiggle its tail about on my computer. At the same time, I really wanted to give my GeForce card a spin after reading up on the article by Mark Kilgard that described real-time perpixel bump-mapping using NVidia GPUs. The aim was also to demonstrate that real-time per-pixel rendering coupled with deformable geometry (via some sort of vertex-blending) was possible on today's hardware. This project will also serve as a guide to people out there learning to do real-time hardware rendering on today's PCs. It'll work both ways.... I'll learn from the advice and criticisms sent to me and people who download the code and read the documentation will learn how to (and not to) implement hardware rendering.

ODDSaur is an opensource project. You are free to download the code, modify and redistribute it for your own programs. ODDSaur utilizes OpenGL for hardware rendering and requires a NVidia Geforce, Geforce2 and above GPU to run. This is because ODDSaur uses the NVidia programmable register extensions for per-pixel bumpmapping.

ODDSaur was written and compiled in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 for the Win32 enviroment. Most of the techniques used in the implementation of per-pixel bumpmapping is based on Mark Kilgard's article titled :

"A Practical and Robust Bump-mapping Technique for Today’s GPUs"

I highly recommend anyone interested in doing perpixel lighting to read up on his article.