ProgramNew Java Ray Tracer
October 23, 2012 - 6:32 pm by Joss Whittle Dissertation Graphics Java UniversityAs part of the research for my dissertation on GPU Accelerated Path Tracing I thought it would be a good idea to have another crack at writing a Ray Tracer. Unlike my previous ray tracer which was slow, clunky, and produce sub-par results I think this time I’ve done a pretty good job.
The new ray tracer includes a bunch of advanced features such as Texture/Specular/Normal Mapping, Octrees, Photon Mapping, and Adaptive Super-Sampling.
The part of the ray tracer I am most pleased with has got to be Photon Mapping, which is the process of simulating natural and secondary lighting.
Before rendering begins photons are fired out of the light sources in the scene and are bounced around as they collide with objects. At each collision a photon is posed a choice, “Do you die? Or do you keep on living?”, if the photon dies it takes the colour of where it intersected and it is stored in the photon map; on the other hand if the photon decided to live it picks up a little bit of light from its current position and a reflection vector is calculated, it is then fired off in the new direction.
In the image below you can see the effect of Photon Mapping (left) and what the scene would have otherwise looked like without it (right).
An implementation of the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm was used for searching the photon map for nearest photons to a given intersection location. The algorithm was optimized by storing intermediate photon maps for each object in the scene (triangular meshes were treated as single objects).
The effects of different K values on the K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm can be seen below. The K values used (in order) were: K = 1, K = 10, K = 50, K = 100, K = 500
Lambert shading gives diffuse colour for objects such that the further away they point from a light source the darker they appear.
Phong shading calculates the Specular Highlights that appear on glossy objects. The phong shading is added to the diffuse (lambert) shading to yeild the final colour.
Blinn-Phong shading is an optimization on phong shading which is faster to compute while offering similar results. Phong shading computes specular highlights using an expensive reflection vector calculation; Blinn-Phong shading improves on this by computing a half-way vector between the view direction and the light source to use for estimating the specularity of the surface.
