Adding Soft Shadows, Anti-Aliasing, and Color Bleeding to a Raytracer

Jenee Hughes, Final Project

CSC 473: Advanced Rendering Techniques

Winter 2010, Dr. Zoe Wood

For my final project, I chose to implement soft shadows, anti-aliasing and color bleeding in my raytracer.

Sharp Shadow examples (the "Before" pictures):

To implement soft shadows, I decided to use multiple point light sources, arranged in a 3x3x3 cube, like below:

Soft Shadows (the "After" pictures)

Side-by-side Comparison

The above split-screens show the base-case of soft shadow vs sharp shadow comparison. (The sharp shadow pictures, in these and all the following screenshots, have been made darker, to help with differentiation).

Above you can see how the sphere's soft shadow is reflected back up onto itself.

Color Bleed

I am honestly not sure if color bleed will work by the time I need to turn this in.

Anti-aliasing

I first generated the entire raytraced image as normal, and then I averaged each pixel with all the ones around it.

Comparison of Soft Shadowed Non-AntiAliased vs AntiAliased