Scanline and Raytracer Graphics

Scanline Image

Week 1
During our first week, we were introduced to OpenGL and drawing primitives such as triangles, as well as coloring and scanline rendering. I decided to create a Pikachu, which consists of several polygons. The image accepts keyboard input -- upon pressing 'Space', an apple of a random size, color, angle, and position appears in the background. Each time a new apple is created, all the other ones rotate. A bunch of apples!
Week 2
In this week, we learned about geometric modeling. I used Blender the first time to create 3D models, and learned how to use lights to adjust the lighting of a scene. I also learned about shading and the Phong reflection model to apply colors to the scene. I decided to base my scene on a Playstation 2/Wii video game called Okami.
Week 3
After learning about texturing, normal mapping, and displacement mapping, I was able to make the image look much better and more realistic. I added a lot more objects to the scene after creating them in Blender.
Week 4
This week was spent polishing the image. I changed some textures to improve the scene, and added and moved around some objects to hide seams. I adjusted the material properties of some textures as well to make the scene slightly brighter. My image was inspired by Okami, a video game which uses a traditional Japanese brush art style. I wanted to recreate this in a more realistic setting. Every model started out as a cube, cylinder, or plane which I then manipulated and subdivided until I was satisfied (except for the wolf which I found online). A total of 604 objects were placed in OpenGL; this process was simplified a lot by using the same object (like the trees), but scaling and rotating it to make it look different. Detailed textures such as grass and wood were found online and applied in Blender; other textures such as the gradients of the gate and blossoms were created in Microsoft Word and touched up in Microsoft Paint. A total of 20 different textures were used. Mt. Fuji in the background and the ground are two planes with textures mapped onto it. A lot of the perspective was achieved by carefully scaling, tilting, and positioning the objects. To polish up the image, I manually went through the OBJ files to change material settings and placed extra objects to hide seams between objects.

Raytracer Graphics

Week 7
This week we were introduced to raytracing and learned about shadows, reflection, and refraction. I began implementing a scene from Pikmin, a video game by Nintendo. The shadows still look a little weird and need some work and the lighting needs fixing.
Week 8
After learning about acceleration structures and sampling, I applied them to my image. I used an AABB tree because my image has many clusters of objects (instead of a uniform grid which works better for images with a more uniform spread of objects). I used a sampling rate of 4 for this particular image to get rid of aliasing, and also added a bunch more objects.
Week 9
This week we learned about camera effects, including depth of field and participating media. I added both of these to my image. The depth of field help give the background a sort of blurred look, and participating media was used to give the glow of the fireflies.
Week 10
The final week of class was just polishing up the image. I made the scene darker so it would look more like a forest floor and the fireflies can stand out more. I also adjusted some objects and textures so they would look better.
My image was inspired by a series of video games called Pikmin and I wanted to recreate its realistic, nature-y style. I found models for the Pikmin, apple, and flowers online but created everything else in Blender and applied textures in Blender as well. The background image is composed of a large tree and smaller trees in the distance, which I combined using Photoshop. The water droplets (upper left) and the lake are simple objects with a refractive/reflective material applied in the raytracer. The lake is semi-transparent with fish swimming within. The fireflies and shafts of light were created using participating media and by modifying the code such that instead of attenuating light, it adds a layer of light on top. The fireflies were created using a white sphere and centering a smoke sphere on it to give it a glow effect. I wrote a script in C++ to generate the volumetric data for the light streams (which are skewed cylinders), using logarithmic decay for fading. I also tried to get a dappled light effect on the ground by placing many leaves above the scene and directing the light sources downwards through the leaves (although this effect isn’t quite visible...). Finally, I turned on depth of field with a sampling rate of 36.