Toward the Final Project

I'm going to make an animation for the final project which includes a lot of the fun or tricky things from the semester, along with the volume rendering I was working on in the last post.  Toward that end, I have lots to do:  Scripting a smooth path through the scene, synchronizing the movements or animations of all the moving parts, fixing the script which should allow all the machines in the cs lab to be simultaneously working on different frames of my scene, fixing the bugs which were affecting my ability to properly texture a sphere with the map of the earth, killing a newly introduced bug where all my spheres have to be filled with smoke (oops!), etc.

Here's the first step, get my rotating, textured sphere back in the mix.  I haven't had it available since I did my raytracer rewrite (which is already really suffering from sophomore syndrome, by the way).  So I brought it back and fixed the texture coordinates.  See below.

Then it was time to parameterize a plane curve for my raytracing camera to follow.  I chose to move it along the y axis while it's x position oscillates sinusoidally.  Check it out, here it is, with direct lighting of the volume turned off.

Same scene below, but now with the direct lighting turned on.  Kind of interesting, but wrong.

Now I took some time to set up a little scene and include some of the recent features of my raytracer, like texturing, dielectrics and volume rendering.  Here's a trip around the scene.

I'll want the final scene to be rendered at as high a quality as possible, I'd like the direct lighting of my volume to work properly, and I'm hoping to get a good quality video with resolution about 1024 x 768.  If I could fix the shadows cast by transparent and smoky spheres to look correct, that would be great too.  I'll probably have to forget (for now) about putting the whole scene on something that looks like a park bench and lighting it with a light probe map.

Here's a really large (~25MB) file you can download if you want to see a nicer looking version of the round trip around the scene.  It's 1024 x 1024 pixels, and I used 25 rays per pixel to anti-alias it, which still probably wasn't enough for that resolution.

Hi res version