Tong

Tong is a raytracer that I developed between October 2005 and May 2006. After assessment in June 2006, it was awarded 100%: the highest mark ever awarded for the Advanced Graphical Algorithms module. The module was graded not only on quality of output, but also the features that were implemented.

Any downloads and screenshots on this page are provided as they were when they were submitted for grading. Newer renders will be on their way in October onwards and will be part of Tong 2.0 (Daedalus). A page for this will be created when enough presentable content has been generated.

In the mean time, please feel free to review this version of Tong’s features and renders! Most of the models were made by Alice Darcy, except the rubbish ones and the Sibenik Cathedral. The rubbish ones were, of course, made by me.

Images

These are the images that will be submitted for assessment (or have not been flagged as a test render). Each of the following images is a link to a page describing the processes involved in creating that scene and a link to the full-resolution image or animation.

Click here for more

Tong’s Feature List (so far)

Tong incorporates a fully featured raytracer and photon mapper, including:

True specular reflection.
Refraction and Fresnel.
Point, spot and area lights.
Correct soft shadowing.
4, 8 or 16x anti-aliasing using subpixel jittering.
Keyframe animation.
Oct-tree and bounding box optimisation for meshes.
Option to cache oct-tree data to disk for faster future renders.
Path Tracing for global illumination.
Photon Mapping for global illumination (sans caustics – planned for version 2).
Efficient photon map final gathering stage.
Ability to cache photon map data to disk.
A kd-Tree using the ANN library.
Depth of field including adjustable aperture and focal point depth.
Logarithmic tone mapping (Stockham) for High Dynamic Range scenes.
Normal mapping, specular mapping and opacity mapping.
Windows XP Professional and XP x64, Linux Fedora 5 and Fedora 5 x86_64 supported.
Fully flexible command line and now Windows interfaces.
3DS Max file support (using 3DS).
Model format using meta data so you can add custom data to your models.
Light shaders are self-contained in DLL’s for extensibility.
Ability to combine previous renders with new renders including addition, modulation and luminance average.
Ability to combine renders with custom filters.
PNG, TGA and ILM’s high dynamic range EXR formats for textures and output images.
Environment sphere and cube mapping.
Cube and spherical image-based lighting.
Light bloom.
Image Dithering.
Noise filtering.

Finally, if you can guess why it’s called Tong, you win a cookie.

More Sample Images

These are selected renders that I have chosen specifically for this page. However, if you want to see all the images that I have produced (including goofs), you can view them in chronological order here. Click a thumbnail to be taken to the full-size image.