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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Projects, Tong Raytracer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.