Introduction

This is my project website for the Final CS563 Project. Here you will find details and progress of the Final project assignment in CS563: Advanced Computer Graphics

This was an attempt to get realistic skin rendering. Unfortunately, there is no final image, just a series of test screenshots. This is the model I decided on working with, I named him Ming.... :

Here he is rendered, floating in the now famous Cornell box. (Hey at least there is some color bleeding on his face)

Next, I set about trying to get participating media working... After some hours of work I started to see something that looked like a spherical cloud of smoke: After gaining *some* confidence that I was seeing some good results, I then moved on to try and render a smoke box... As can be seen in the picture, there is an issue with shadows. Since the photons bouncing off surfaces end up hitting the 'volume', they never deposit themselves onto the ground, so this false shadow appears. There is no shortage of knobs to turn. scattering, absorbsion, scaling, etc, etc.... almost too many variables to tweak in order to get something decent looking. Next, after playing with different parameters. The above pics were using an isotropic scattering pattern. Bascically, photons were able to bounce off in any direction once they entered the volume and scattered. A typical pattern looks like this for photons hitting a sphere: I then moved on and added in the Henyey-Greenstein function for scattering. Below are a few patterns with different G value. For testing purposes I set the photon to all enter the medium at the same point, and then injected a few thousand photons to get a pattern. You can see how the pattern gets funneled tighter as G approaches 1.

G = 0.1

G=0.99 Next, I tried to shoot photons straight through a sphere, just to see If I could see a column of bright light: Finally, I adjusted some more parameters and fixed a few more bugs, and ended up with this. This illustrated the light moving closer to a flat blue partition. As the light gets closer, more white bleeds through. Also, the edges of the participating medium get darker as the light is focused more on the center of the wall. This is probably closest to a final image, since I still don't have everything working... and I've actually taken a step back and can't reproduce the following image. Its sort of a participating medium modelling a translucent Blue piece of glass.