Problem Statement

Take a flock of sheep on a whirlwind journey from green pastures to the barn. These sheep are the epitome of what a Fellowship is, and strongly adhere to what is known as the Sheep Code. This code has been extensively described in Mr. Baaa’s latest best selling book, The Woolly Sheep’s guide to Sheep etiquette in the 21st century, but we shall summarize its essence here:

• A sheep must always try to flock with its “Fellows”, at each moment in time.
• A sheep shall try its best to stay alive.
• A sheep shall not touch/fall through the edge of the world (the map), which is believed to be flat.
• A sheep must always reach the barn.
• No sheep shall get hit by a moving object/obstacle that is not a sheep.
• No sheep shall steer away from the flock.
• No sheep must be left behind.

Any sheep that fails to adhere to the code, will cease to be a part of the Fellowship. Naturally, no sheep wants this, because they could lose out on a lot of benefits (like no tax breaks! :O).

Your task is to create a simulation to have the sheep follow the “Sheep Code” as they travel through 4 maps we provide you, which denote the 4 levels of the hackathon. The simulation must be with good playback (the sheep should move at a speed similar to the real world).

You are provided with:

• The viewer, which is a blender file that receives the position of the sheep at each timestep and displays it for you.
• The terrain data is provided in the OpenVDB format. We provide the code to load the maps and associated metadata.
• A bunch of stub files : https://github.com/usama-ghufran/steerQuest_ABAI.git. They may contain important clues to help you get started or move further with your solution.
• Please go through the README file in the stub, and make sure the output specifications are met.

What it means to cross a level:

Level 0

Take the sheep moving from source to destination. Make sure they follow the rules of flocking!

Level 1

The sheep must navigate static obstacles, as they go from source to destination, while maintaining the flock.

Level 2

There are moving obstacles now. Remember the sheep code.

Level 3

Navigate to the destination through more obstacles. How much do your sheep love the Fellowship?

Submissions

• Upload your code link on Hacker Earth before 7:30 AM on 17 April.
• Important: Create a README file with any special information we might not know like:
• Running instructions (along with any dependencies you know of).
• Technology used in the project.
• Upload gifs of your sheep flocking/moving, this is strongly recommended!

Format

The duration of the Hackathon:

Start: 16 April, 2015, Saturday, 10:00:00 IST
End: 17 July, 2015, Sunday, 7:30:00 IST

At 8:00 AM on 17 April, a closing presentation will be conducted on how this hackathon is connected to the kind of problems that is faced by the industry.

Judging criteria

You will be judged based on the Sheep Code of course, but we’ll add some specific criteria:

• Completeness of the solution - how many levels crossed?
• How well do the sheep flock - How good is your simulation?
• Do the sheep reach the barn?
• Techniques used to avoid obstacles.
• Time taken.

The decision of the judges shall be final and binding.

This concludes the problem statement.

The goal of this hackathon is to give an exposure to the Animation, Gaming, VFX technologies. This activity is a small glimpse into the challenges faced by the graphics programmer.

Code your way in the hackathon to solve a problem that many graphics programmers work on today, to achieve more and more unbelievable feats in Visual Effects! This hackathon is for anyone who loves to code, is a game-enthusiast or a hacker at heart.

Not only will you be recognized for your skills, by some of the best in the Coding Industry, you will also be blissfully rewarded by the exciting prizes that await the Winners. That aside, such events are great way to network and meet Industry Professionals and more importantly get noticed for your skill-sets at a platform where it matters the most “a meaningful step in the right direction for growth” as an industry expert put it!

Why you should participate?

Refer this page for more information: http://www.abaifest.com/hackathon.html

*The registration fee for Steer Quest is Rs 250 for individuals and Rs 400 for teams. Passes will be provided on registration.

The pass will allow access to all talks and areas of the event for both the days. Coupons for meals/refreshments during the duration of the Steer Quest will also be provided with the passes.*

Contestants will have to bring their laptops with these minimum requirements: Laptops(s) Wifi Enabled, Graphics Card, Linux distribution (preferably recent version), Openvdb installation - version 2.3 or greater, Latest versions of Chrome/Firefox and Blender

Run this script in your terminal to install the dependencies for the hackathon.

Alternatively they can copy paste this onto their terminal:

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sudo apt-get -y install g++ gcc freeglut3-dev libglew-dev libglm-dev

building dependencies

sudo apt-get -y install liblog4cplus-dev sudo apt-get -y install zlib1g-dev sudo apt-get -y install libboost-system-dev sudo apt-get -y install libcppunit-dev sudo apt-get -y install libglfw-dev sudo apt-get -y install libjemalloc-dev

OpenVDB

sudo apt-get -y install g++ sudo apt-get -y install libopenvdb-dev sudo apt-get -y install libboost-dev sudo apt-get -y install libilmbase-dev sudo apt-get -y install libtbb-dev

to visualize vdb grids

sudo apt-get install libopenvdb-tools

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Good to Know and Brush up ! algorithms, data structures, simulation, C++ concepts and signed distance field (SDF) concepts

No Prior knowledge/experience in the field of Animation/VFX/Gaming is required.

One thing that we wanted to give you a heads up is that the hall in which you will be hacking will be adjacent to the main hall of the event where all the presentations / key notes will be going on. Unfortunately as the hall is very big and high we don't have sound proofing, so please expect noise disturbance, we request you to carry your head phones along so that you can suppress the noise from adjacent hall.