Rendering Project

If you shine enough light at object, eventually, it’s reflectance > is going to change when you burn a whole in it

Eddie Talvala

I’ve been working pretty hard on my cs348b project the past few days. Sergey and I are trying to render the Eagle Nebula. The bulk of the time I spent was just on sifting through papers and deciphering what they were getting at. Actually incorporating the ideas into pbrt’s existing code was not too much of a hassle.

My part of the project is working on volumetric photon mapping. It sounds pretty fancy but the idea is actually quite simple and naturally extends off of photon mapping (for surfaces). The main idea for volumes is to

  1. Shoot photons into your scene
  2. If they pass through participating media, allow the photon to either
    • deposit within the media
    • absorb and emit radiance
    • transmit through the media
  3. During rendering, look at photons near the ray to compute the irradiance

I spent a lot of today debugging my photon tracing step (1 and 2) and hopefully I can nail down most of step 3 tonight. I hope that eventually I will have time to implement some newer ideas, like the beam radiance estimate for step 3.

Meanwhile, Sergey has been making good progress on his end. He has modeled the clouds, implemented a primitive to define the density on, and just started getting emission to work. Damn, that really makes it seem like I have not been doing my part! If you want to track the progress, visit this page. I will periodically put new pictures there.

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