CS688 Final Project: Ray Tracer

Jie Xu

CGL, University of Waterloo

Statement

Based on the assignment 4, I implemented a ray tracer and used it to render a scene. To render a scene of Escher's impossible world, I'll use CSG modeling to construct the buildings, apply texture mapping and bump mapping to the surfaces of walls, floors etc. Soft shadow and fuzzy reflection will be used to improve the result. I'll also implement fish eye to provide especial effects.

Objective 1: New primitives

I add such new primitives: cylinder, cone, torus.

new primitives


Objective 2: Hierarchical bounding box

To improve the performance, a new property bounding box is added. The bounding boxes of all objects in the scene are composed of a tree, I travers the tree from root to leaf.

bounding box

To render the forward scene, it will cost 1120 seconds without bounding box, and 16.72 seconds with bounding box. There are 25000 rays, and only 275 rays intersect with the model. To speed up the processing, I'll set the bounidng box on to render the following objects.


Objective 3: Aniti-aliasing

Using super sampling and stochastic sampling to anti-aliasing. I first sampling the four corner sub-pixels of a pixel. If their color values aren't equal then I randomly select 5 sub-pixels in this pixel, and average the result value.

aliasing

anti-aliasing

The first one without anti-aliasing, it costs 11.02 seconds. The second one with anti-aliasing, it costs 70.23 seconds

Objective 4: CSG modeling

Using CSG modeling to construct complicate models. And the CSG operations can be composed to a CSG tree.

csg

Objective 5: Fuzzy reflection

I use distribute ray tracing to generate fuzzy reflection. For each reflection ray, I add ten random rays around it to trace.

sharp

fuzzy

The first one is sharp reflection. The second one is fuzzy reflection. The chess board texture is generated using solid texture method. Stone texture is mapped to the pillar object.

Objective 6: Texture mapping

An image can be mapped to an object. Solid texture is also implemented. I use Perlin noise function to generate texturel.
I mapped such images to objects.

character    picture

texture

I use 3D Perlin noise function to generate marble texture.

solid texture

The following figure is refraction with solid texture.

refraction

Objective 7: Bump mapping

Using bump mapping to simulate the  texture of walls, ground. I first transfer a bump image to grayscale image. then compute its gradient. The axis of parametric surface can be computed by rotating standard coordinate. The following is stair rendered using bump mapping and texture mapping.

stair

Objective 8: Fish eye

The view plane is a hemi-sphere. It will distort the scene.

fish eye

Objective 9: Soft shadow

Using area light to get soft shadow. I use a sphere light source. There are 15 point light sources distributing on the sphere surface equally.  
The tower is rendered with texture mapping and soft shadow.

tower0

The following scene is rendered with soft shadow, texture mapping and bump mapping.

soft shadow


Objective 10: Final scene -- Escher's impossible world

My Final scene is rendering a scene that is similar with the Escher's impossible world "ascending and decending".
Escher's scene is the following figure:

escher


First, I construct the models of different buildings.
The following building is rendered using texture mapping and soft shadow.

left room

This building is rendered using texture mapping and bump mapping.

left room2

upstair

Now, this is my final scene. It is very similar with Escher's painting. It is rendered using all features.

final scene1

another result is using fish eye. It gives us an exaggerated scene.

fish eye

Now, we view the scene from another viewpoint so we can find where is the trick.

final3

Extension: Distortion

Though the fish eye can distort the scene, the result isn't quite good, because it changes the whole scene.  The following figure is a painting of Escher. It only distorts the centre of the scene.

escher_distort


To implement it, I first select project the centre part to a sphere. The following is the result:

distort1

But we can see it is poor at the edge of the sphere. So I select another curve surface:
formular
The result shows that it is similar with Escher's painting.

distort2