Program
The rantings of a lunatic Scientist
Here is a more converged render of the pool balls which I left running on my uni computer overnight. The image is 1024 x 1024 pixels and was rendered to 1250 samples over the course of around 4 hours. There are also several notable changes that have been made to the renderer which show up […]
Continuing on with my work implementing direct lighting contributions to the renderer I thought I’d take a second to show off some shots I’m most happy with. This first shot I am most pleased with, though it could possibly be subject bias due to my having stared at it for hours as I program; however, […]
Finally starting to make up for the time I took off over christmas! I have successfully added an unbiased direct lighting calculation into the renderer which makes it possible to render more complex scenes with smaller and sparser light sources. Below are two images rendered with direct lighting and a small (1×1) light source simulating […]
Thought it was about time to test some caustics on the renderer. Lately I’ve been both fascinated and frustrated by the strange forms and shapes that occur when light refracts and reflects off of lit surfaces. A great example of this is a metallic ring laying on a diffuse surface. Light bouncing onto the inside […]
I thought I’d make some high quality comparison shots of some of the shaders I’ve been working on. Above you can see a side by side comparison of a perfect mirror BRDF and a Phong based BRDF with exponents of one million and ten for the centre and right images respectively. While the Phong-like BRDF […]
Previously I’ve debugged my KD-trees only by looking at archaic console printouts where at best each descending node in the structure is tabbed a couple of spaces further in from it’s parent. However, seeing as I’m currently building a new renderer it seemed apt to build in a method for visualizing the generated trees. This […]
Today has been a pretty good day, both for me and for my work. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working from home because all I am doing lately is background reading and coding my new renderer. At first it was nice to know that my workspace was only a commando roll (or […]
So I’m still playing with graphs in Matlab… I shouldn’t complain, I know. I should be cherishing how laid back and relaxed the PhD experience is right now compared the where I’ll be a couple of years from now. The function f(x) is shown in green, the sample distribution in blue with histogram bins marked […]
It’s still not perfect, far from it in fact, but it’s progress none the less. I’ve been reading a lot lately about Metropolis Light Transport, Manifold Exploration, Multiple Importance Sampling (they do love their M names) and it’s high time I started implementing some of them myself. So it’s with great sadness that I am […]
A little update on what I’ve been learning about lately. Metropolis-Hastings is an algorithm for sampling random values out of a probability distribution. Effectively, for a function f(x) you wish to simulate where the curve is higher it is more probable that a random number will be chosen from there. Uniform sampling of the range […]