CPE-473 Spring 2016

Introduction

Creating a Raytracer has been a long and tedious journey.... The images about to be shown use the raytracer authored by Brandon Clark created during one Cal Poly quarter in the course CPE 473 Advanced Rendering Techniques; the link to his github repo can be found by clicking on the github icon on the left side panel. The images produced below use Global Illumination, reflection, and refractions to achieve the complexity of their look. This raytracer offers much more, but also has much future work. Go check it out!

The final project also included creating a scene within Unity demonstrating virutal reality with Google Cardboard. A video below will show you the final product. At the bottom of this page, you will also find a useful tutorial/link which will help you reproduce this project.

Raytracer Technology

Global Illumination

As you can see in this image, global illumination is most noticeable within the eyes of our character. The original color of the eyes are white; thus, we see red and blue from the body and ears of our character.

Reflections

How many spheres are there in this image? Trick question... only one sphere. This one sphere is in fact within a cube which is mirrored; thus, we see infinite reflections of itself.

Refractions

Nothing better than some good ol' refractions. Within this image, all the spheres are refracting each other. Three sphere are aligned along the z-axis while two are aligned along the x-axis. In total, beside the smaller spheres in front, we have 5 spheres. Altogether, we have 8 spheres.

Problem Area:

Many of the complex povray files take a tremendous amount of time to create a final image. Future work to making this application better would be to improve the performance such that we can quickly render out complex images. Improving the Bounding Volume Hierarchy algorithm may be one step in achieving this goal. Profiling and fixing small errors is also another option.

Unity VR with Google Glass Demo

Here is a simple video of the final project demo for Google Glass. This project may be replicated by using the reference/tuturial linked below. Enjoy and happy VR'ing!