Image Synthesis - Project 14

In Project 14, for my "cool effect" I implemented shade trees. Shade trees provide a procedural, modular workflow for determining a color at a given point based on various parameters similar to the ones needed in the Heyney-Greenstein Phase Function.

These shade trees allow simple modules to be built and combined in chains or branches. Some common shade trees provide basic shading effects like Phong shading, Lambertian shading, anisotropic shading, ramp shading, etc. Other modules allow combinations and filters to provide more complex images using these simple modules.

Below are a few different spheres using some shading modules...

A sphere shaded using the Heyney-Greenstein module


A sphere shaded using a ramp module. This module allows the colors to be colored based on certain points of interest


A sphere shaded using a texture module, where the theta and phi of the sphere are mapped from [0,1]x[0,1] on the texture


Here, a layered filter module with two shaders connected to it. It also uses another texture shader as a mask to determine which of these to shaders to use


These shade trees scale to as many levels as the effect requires. The final image at the bottom of this post shows an image using several modules. A Heyney-Greenstein module provides a shiny metallic surface. Another is a texture module to provide the metal surface. These modules must be combined in a combo filter separately from the rust so that the rust doesn't appear shiny. This combo filter is fed into a mask filter with the rust as it's other shader. A texture module is fed into the mask filter to use as the mask.

The sphere with just the metal texture


The sphere using the Heyney-Greenstein module


The sphere with just the rust texture


The sphere mapped using the mask texture


The final sphere using the entire shade tree described above. This gives the overall feel of the metal, while splotching rust on parts in a natural-looking splat

Image Synthesis - Project 12

In Project 12, the Heyney-Greenstein Phase Function was implemented in the renderer. The Heyney-Greenstein Phase Function (HGPF) is an imperical formula to simulate diffuse and specular reflection for a variety of materials using only two parameters. This function uses these these two parameters stored in each object and takes the incidence angle as input. This provides a much greater flexibility for different materials than using the simpler Lambertian reflection.

Finding little data as to proper values, I rendered an image using a wide range of values. From the image generated, it appears a high g-value seems important to produce a good image. This component supposedly relates directly to the angle where most of the light is leaving. It seems natural that a g-value closer to 1 will produce better pictures where light bounces off at a 90-degree angle, while a 0 value gives very splotchy results. The w-value used in the function scales the function and seems to have less of an effect after tone mapping is appled.

In the image below, 64 spheres are rendered. All spheres share the same color component, but have differing w and g parameters in the HGPF. From left to right, the g-component ranges from zero to one. From top to bottom the w-component ranges from zero to one

Image Synthesis - Project 11

In Project 11, subsurface scattering is added to the renderer. This implies that light hitting the surface of the material enters and bounces around inside the medium before exiting. Many materials such as grapes, skin and marble exhibit this quality. Subsurface scattering in this implementation used ray marching, where the ray enters the medium and bounces around until exiting. Because the ray actually bounced around inside the object instead of just off the surface, the rendering was far more computationally expensive than rendering this scene without SSC.

In the image below, two spheres are placed side by side with a large rectangular light source placed overhead. The sphere on the left uses subsurface scattering while the sphere on the right uses just Lambertian reflections. Light shining from above simply bounces of the top of the Lambertian sphere, leaving the bottom dark and unilluminated. The SSC sphere, however, has light shining through the medium and appearing at the bottom of the sphere as many materials would

Image Synthesis - Project 10

In Project 10, we were to implement participating media. Participating media involves computing physical bounces of light in media such as fog, dust, smoke, etc. where the light bounces around inside the volume instead of just diffusing, reflecting, or refracting.

To implement this, I used the standard marching technique through an axis-aligned bounding box. A ray was sampled multiple times across its vector using small steps. When these steps were inside the bounding volume, they probabilisitcally hit some of the media.

In the figure below, participating media is used to simulate a gaseous volume under the cube. Right now my code is very ineffecient and took six hours to get these results. Earlier images not requiring participating media required far less time to converge

Image Synthesis - Project 9

In Project 9, we were to add the Beere-Lambert Law to our renderer. The Beere-Lambert Law models the amount of light absorbed while traveling through a medium. Because different wavelengths are absorbed based on the distance they must travel through the medium, different colors can be absorbed causing different wavelengths to be more pronounced. Certain types of glass often absorb high and low wavelengths leaving a greenish tint at certain angles. Usually this effect can be seen when the light is going through the greatest distance of the glass. To compute the absorbtion at certain frequencies, euler's number e was taken to the exponent of the distance times a large negative constant (which changes based on the scene metrics).

In the picture below, five spheres are modeled. The back left sphere is a reflective sphere, while the back right is a diffuse sphere. Theses spheres are only to provide background to the scene. The spheres in front are used for comparison. The left sphere is a diffuse/reflective sphere with a purplish hue. The middle sphere is a translucent sphere that implements the Beere-Lambert Law based on the distance of the medium. This gives the sphere the slightly greenish tint. The sphere on the right is also a translucent sphere, but does not implement the Beere-Lambert Law. This was to show the difference in hues generated by this principle.

This figure shows several spheres. The front-middle sphere uses the Beere-Lambert Law to absorb certain frequencies of light. The front-right sphere has the same parameters as this sphere, except it does not implement the Beere-Lambert Law. This image took 5 hours and 24 minutes to render

Image Synthesis - Project 7 and 8

In Project 7, we were to use our renderer to model the Cornell box. This box was compared against a physical model to compare accuracy in the rendering software. This scene's walls and light are modeled using the geometry data and color data from the Cornell box at http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/online/box/data.html.

In addition to the light source and the walls, Project 8 added fresnel effects to the renderer. Instead of the two blocks found in the original Cornell box, two diffuse spheres have been placed in the far corners of the room. A large transparent sphere is placed in the center of the room, which shows the light refracting through it.

The scene's light seems rather blurry because it was moved down slightly to not create artifacts with the ceiling, which is one giant polygon.

Below is an image of the scene rendered at 400x400 and tone mapped. It took 4 hours to render, which is rather sad