Peter Lewis’ Portfolio

I have now finally stopped working on my raytracer. Oh, it’s not finished, but I need to work on other projects for a while. To prevent me from working on it I have put it on a USB pen and given it to my girlfriend. She’s ginger so I can rely on her stubbornness.

However, I still have the binaries so I can leave scenes rendering while I work, like this one, which took 7 hours. You’ll notice the soft shadowing which is a new feature which I haven’t fully optimised yet, which explains the extraordinary render times. Know that this will be fixed before I deem the project finished: I have more important things to kill my processor with! You’ll also notice the diffuse interreflection between the plane and the pot which is an example of photon mapping. I made the pot bright green to exaggerate this feature.

My next scene will be a much more complex interior scene which will take ages to render, so it’s important that I get blood out of a stone when it comes to my soft shadowing algorithm. At the moment I think it’s the way that I’m stochastically sampling each emissive plane, which relies on rejection sampling to generate a non-biased sample but my implementation might be slightly buggy. I will have to try out Pix at some point and see where most of my bottlenecks are. Blood out of a stone.

Before I gave away the code, I was also working on a Windows version, which will allow me to specify areas to re-render and also apply filters as a post-process. It’s basic at the moment, but it will grow as I go along. I’m trying not to spend too much time on it as the rendering is the most important part.

I have been doing quite a bit of my Final Year Project, which is making me happy. I have yet to do my A.I. and physics projects yet, but they’re taking a back seat for the moment. The problem with my FYP so far is that I have little to show in terms of actual product (which is something my supervisor keeps reiterating), but I am concentrating on analysis and design for the moment. This is generally what happens with me: I do lots of work yet seem to not produce anything, but then suddenly it all clicks together and it’s done. This isn’t deliberate: it just seems to happen.

Final Year Project for the win, methinks.

I am currently staying at my parent’s because of my gran’s funeral. I return to Middlesbrough on Thursday, which isn’t far away, but is never-the-less becoming more and more of a problem. I was intending to get some work done on a project for a start-up games company, Halch, but my laptop’s USB ports seem to have died leaving me unable to test my work. I really need to get around to replacing it, but alas, I have no money.

Also, because the other projects I am working on require shader support, they have to be ruled out too because my laptop is old and inferior. I have several computers at my disposal that I could continue my work on, yet I have no copies of Visual Studio in which to do it with. I am well and truly buggered.

This means that I have to complete my final thesis in less than a week, complete the Halch project in the same week and then get cracking on all of my other modules. In the case of three (out of four) of them that actually means starting. This is becoming a bit messy. The reason that I’m so annoyed about this is because I planned all of this out, yet life (and now death) seems to have done everything that they can to screw me over.

I might turn to drink. That might be fun.

Edit:

Oh, and my web hosting company, Servelocity, offer a server with root access running Linux Red Hat, Apache & PHP, MySQL, 10GB of space and 10GB of transfer monthly, for only £9.95 a month. This is a dream come true for anyone that wants a server, but unfortunately they don’t tell you on the front page that you’re sharing the machine with several other people on a virtual server basis.

The thing is, the server package that I’ve picked is for very low trafic websites and games servers, which is fair enough. However, I seem to have misjudged how many hits I get a day and so the server controller is basically cutting access to my server completely to give other people a chance. Therefore there has been loads of downtime, the server is slow, constantly running out of memory and I’m getting pretty annoyed, frankly. Under normal circumstances I’d say “you get what you pay for”, but in this case I’m paying a whole load of money for a website that’s down more than it is up. If I want a stable server that supports the load that I need I need to pay at least £5 more monthly. I’m paying £10 already, which is already painful.

I think I’m going to have to change again.