Peter Lewis’ Portfolio

Life’s becoming rather busy lately. A typical week is busy enough, yet I strangely manage to find time to do the things I like to do. This week is pretty busy as well, as I have a few additions to the schedule. I should say “replacements” actually, because I am fully booked every week-day, so I’ve had to move a few things. This week will be rather interesting, the reasons for which are listed below.

Today I have a meeting with my final year project supervisor (in which I have to convince him that the new project idea is the best idea since someone thought, “hey, I could sell this bread sliced!”). I have to go to work where I have to spend a few hours actually getting something to compile, which is driving me crazy. Also, the director is leaving for Australia today and won’t be back until after the deadline, so that’s pretty screwed up. Finally, I’ve got to get this iMac fixed.

Tomorrow I’ve got 4 hours of University to do, a meeting with the GSS and then I have to tidy the house. Oh, and write a report for my FYP. I wanted to go to Poker Night, which is being hosted by Alistair Parr, but I had to decline. The tidying is in preparation for Wednesday, in which my dad arrives for lunch. After he’s gone, I’m going to a North East Games Industry Think & Drink session to meet some of the developers in the North East, which I have no doubt will include Onisoft whom I’ve always wanted to meet. Unfortunately, it totally overruns the GSS department leads meeting and being “Technical Director”*, it’s pretty important that I be there, but my place is being filled by lead programmer Ashely Canning and a fellow 3rd year of mine, Richard Bangs.

Finally, on Thursday, there’s a games industry conference which I’m going to be attending. I know little about this at the moment other than the fact that it’s on and that I said that I’d go.

The rest of the week is reasonably calm. I have loads of work to do, of course, but that’s nothing new. But anyway, enough of my plans for the week…

Tong is progressing … well … not as fast as I’d like. Some people reading this probably had aspirations as to my homicide while reading that probably, but hear me out. The latest shots reveal some interesting artefacts. How to get rid of these white dots is eluding me right now. All I know is that somehow the pixels at those locations think they’re being lit by the bright white spotlight that’s behind the window. Obviously they should not only be facing away from this light, but also they are occluded by other geometry. Most confuzzling.

In regards to the (much more important) final year project, I have put many hours of thought into it. I have decided to drop the scripting language: it just wasn’t fun or interesting. Actually, that’s not true: It is fun and interesting and I still want to implement one at some point, but considering I’m doing nothing but raytracing so far it seemed more sensible to do something more relevant. When I go to see my supervisor in 25 minutes a decision will be made as to which one I’m going to be doing.

I am very tired, so I’ll keep this brief.

This is the latest image that I have produced and as you can see it’s come a long way and has a long way to go yet. For a start, I have horrible textures with lo-res bump maps. Of course, I can’t make my own because I suck at art.

I’m attempting to add a flame to that torch, but with little luck so far. The floor looks like a sea of vomit and the banner looks totally flat. The light on the floor is too dim, as is the window. Finally there’s no specular on that crystal ball. I think that gives me a rough To-Do list, as well as getting round to bounding shapes, anti-aliasing and deep into the future, photon mapping.

Ugh. The more cool things I add, the crappier the image looks.

On a different note, I have decided to switch my thesis project. It’s late, but I realised that I prefer rendering to creating my own scripting language. It’s best that I do something that I very much enjoy, rather than simply enjoy. My supervisor wasn’t so happy, I think, but to be honest I’m not so bothered - I’ve only wasted 3 hours of his time compared to wasting 3 weeks of mine. I think he’d object to my apathy, but I remind myself that it’s best to do something that I feel I have a chance of getting done without wanting to commit suicide in the middle of it.

Busy day tomorrow. Night.

I’m going mental over this and this.

The former has weird dark patches that I cannot explain (though I have a feeling that it’s something to do with either my value for epsilon or my normal mapping code), and the latter is just too dark. This isn’t a problem with my raytracer: I’m just an incompetent artist. I attempted to lighten it up in this image, but it just reveals more artefacts.

I also have an issue with 3D Studio Max. It’s driving me crazy. In the .3ds file format, there are entries for emissive colour, refractive index and shininess. After some poking around the material editor I found all of these properties and set them accordingly. However, when I export them from Max to .3ds format, these values remain stubbornly blank. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong or how to fix it.

Finally, that shot with the light coming through the window is not a cheap hack or projected texture. It is actually taking a light source and it is accumulating colour through translucent surfaces using the alpha component of the texture, meaning that I can put the light anywhere and get accurate results. Obviously the light would bend if going through a refractive surface, but there exists no solution to this in standard Whitted raytracing.

Ugh. 3:30 am now … I should really sleep.

It works at last.

New screenshots: Screen 1, Screen 1 Depth, Screen 2, Screen 2 Depth.

As you can probably see, I’m having very peculiar problems with it. It looks as though the triangle isn’t being intersected by the ray, even though it should be. It’s quite baffling…