782 Lab3 - Distributed Raytracer - Vince Scheib & Ryan Geiss

Distributed Ray Tracer w/ Animation
Ryan Geiss & Vince Scheib

[RESULTS]
[OVERVIEW]
[PROJECT LOG]
[TASK ASSIGNMENTS]
[DETAILED BREAKDOWN]
[PAPERS REFERENCED & SUMMARIZED]
[PERSONAL INFORMATION]

RESULTS

We created many images and animations showing antialiasing, soft shadows, soft reflection, soft refraction, depth of field, and motion blur. Here they are:

A big animation with over 8000 spheres. This rendered for days on very large servers, but still only finished 7 oversamples, so it is a bit pixelated. Very nice depth of field and motion blur. Animation designed by Vince.
View the 5.6MB MPEG animation.
View the 2.9MB QuickTime animation.

A nice animation showing motion blur & depth of field. Rendertime was about 4 days on my P133. Each frame has 27 oversamples. Animation designed by Vince.
View the 450KB MPEG animation.
View the 690KB QuickTime animation.

Short animation showing a transparent polygonal cup. Nice refraction & soft shadows. Notice the very faint shadow from the cup. 30 Oversamples. Animation designed by Ryan.
View the 51KB MPEG animation.

A Huge number of polygons, soft shadows, phong shading, soft reflections. Just under 50 oversamples. Picture designed by Ryan.
View the image.

Crazy reflections (Mirrored sphere within mirrored sphere). 100 oversamples. Picture designed by Vince.
View the image.

<-- View a larger version.
Polygons can be shrunken and enlarged to create interesting effects. Pictures designed by Ryan.

Distributed reflection and refraction. Notice that in the first picture the left sphere has a blurred reflection verses the crisp reflection in the right sphere. Pictures designed by Ryan.

Depth of field. Picture by Vince.

An early render, (without antialiasing) showing interesting phong on a polygon object. Soft shadows too. Picture designed by Ryan.

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OVERVIEW

A distributed ray tracer* with the following features:

- Motion Blur
- Anti-aliasing
- Depth of Field
- Glossy Reflections
- Keyframed Animation Control
- Polygonal objects

*- A 'distributed ray tracer' is a ray tracer which oversamples by a linear factor of n, distributing sampling rays to obtain a higher quality result.

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PROJECT LOG

2/18/99	Project initialization. Tasks determined, goals set, this page generated.
2/21/99	Vince overhauled old ray tracer engine to suit the design of the distributed ray tracer. (Not completely done with this yet) Ryan ported old code for polygonal based objects. (Not completely done with this yet)
2/22/99	Vince wrangled with incorporating the polygon object for a while, did some design work on how to set up data for individual frames. Listened to plenty of techno. Entered code to distribute the point lightsource position.
2/23/99	Made sure code is cross platform happy. Phong rendering of polygons done, WOW that looks awesome. Merging of multiple files built in, automatic reuse of previous renders makes it snappy fast to preview and then gradually improve quality without spending all that re-render time. Depth of field & antialiasing done.
2/24/99	Summarized papers
2/27/99	Added Keyframe top level design, animation for materials and observer parameters.
2/28/99	Blurred reflections and transparency implemented. Put together first animation. 'rotation02'.
3/2/99	Started rendering the Vertigo animation on 8 Sun Ultra Sparc II processors.
3/7/99	Stopped rendering the Vertigo animation Made a few other neato images
3/9/99	Gave presentation
3/10/99	Stopped working on this project.

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TASK ASSIGNMENTS

- Ray tracer Top Level Design - Vince

- Motion Blur - Vince

- Anti-aliasing - Vince

- Soft Shadows - Vince

- Depth of Field - Vince

- Blurred Transparency - Ryan

- Glossy Reflections - Ryan

- Image Merging - Ryan

- Keyframed Animation Control - Vince

- Polygonal objects - Ryan

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DETAILED BREAKDOWN

- Motion Blur

Objects have a time parameterized description of movement in space according to keyframes. Sample rays will be distributed throughout the time dimension. This relies solely on being able to retrieve position and other describing characteristics from the animation module for any specified time parameter.

- Anti-aliasing

The sampling ray is perturbed slightly so that samples from various portions of a pixels extruded volume are collected.

- Depth of Field

The eye position (source of sampling ray) is perturbed slightly to simulate the distortion of a lens camera. This will cause blurring of all objects nearer or farther then the center of interest (focal depth).

- Glossy Reflections

Specular reflections are distorted by perturbing the reflected sampling ray.

- Keyframed Animation Control

Object attributes at specified time positions are defined via a text file, the animation module interpolates attributes between these key time positions and can return the proper 'scene' at any specified time value.

- Polygonal objects

A ray tracer's most basic object is a sphere, three sided polygons will also be added to this ray tracer. This involved reading an input file specifying the geometry, transforming the location of the geometry, and calculating intersections with the polygons.

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PAPERS REFERENCED & SUMMARIZED

Cook, Robert L. Thomas Porter, Loren Carpenter. "Distributed Ray Tracing".
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'84. In Computer Graphics 18, 3, pp. 137-145, July 1984.
[SUMMARY]

Painter, James. Kenneth Sloan. "Antialiased Ray Tracing by Adaptive Progressive Refinement".
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'89. In Computer Graphics 23, 3, pp. 281-285, July 1989.
[SUMMARY]

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PERSONAL INFORMATION

Geiss, Ryan M.
mailto:geiss.3@osu.edu
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~geiss/

Scheib, Vincent E.
mailto:sch_REMOVE_THIS_ANTI_SPAM_TEXT_eib@cs.unc.edu
http://www.scheib.net

We were both third year undergraduate students in Computer Science Engineering. (Spring 1999)

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