Dissertation is done!

Rejoice! For after one hell of a long year finally the dissertation is done dusted and thankfully handed in!

This was the final result, a real-time path tracer written in C using OpenCL to compute frames and OpenGl to render them. Here is a simple cornell box style scene that was left to converge for a couple of minutes.

My project fair demo. My graders seemed to like it (I bagged 92% for the Viva!) and so did the PhD students and my coursemates… Not so much praise from the school kids, the phrase “Realistic? Looks nothing like Call of Duty” was used…. First time I’ve ever wanted to smack a child jokes but what can you do. The tech industry people didn’t seem to care for it either which was rather miserable because I had to stand there for 5 hours in a boiling hot room while no one wanted to know about my work.

But I can’t really complain about not getting any job offers because… I got offered a ~~summer research position~~ unconditional fully funded PhD Studentship at the uni! So this summer I’ll be staying in Swansea to effectively continue this project with the goal of getting Path Tracing working much much faster and on mobile devices (tablets most likely).

Here’s an album showing the progress from start to finish throughout the year.