Day - 9

Still working on to accumulate the colors in the path tracer. However, cube is now working.

Path Trace

We have just now generated our first path traced image. However, there is lot of noise which does not go away. Anyways, sharing our first diffuse image with ambient light.

Working on to reduce noise.

First Ray Traced Image

We just finished reading and testing the tutorials from http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1067 and produced my first ray Traced image using the base code from its mandelbrot example. Here is a screenshot of the ray traced image.

The most difficult problem for creating such an image was to find out all the pixels on the screen and how to trace them. So, in the mandelbrot example of those tutorial they have used a technique of tracing the corners. Hence, the problem now comes to how to find the corners of the screen. We used the course notes given to us in CIS460 to find this out. Once that was done, it was really simple to implement ray tracing. Now, We have to figure out how to convert the ray tracer into path tracer.

CIS 565 Final Project-- WebGL Path Tracer

Group member: 

Yue Hu and Ashima Gupta

Introduction: 

In this project, we will use WebGL to embed path tracer in a web page and render realistic scenes with light effects. In path tracer, a large number of ray paths are traced to render an image. Hence, WebGL, which allows GPU accelerated usage of physics and image processing, will be able to produce realtime performance.

Features:

● Basic Path tracing features:

○ Reflection 

○ Refraction

● Anti-alias

● Subsurface scattering

● Real-time interactivity

● Texture Mapping, Bump mapping, Displacement mapping

● Performance optimization

Library: WebGL utility library

Why this topic：

WebGL is latest technology which gives ability to develop and embed cool effects on a web page. Path tracing  can get photo-realistic pictures. Combine webGL technology with path tracing method will make it possible for us to get amazing pictures through web browser.

We already did the path tracer in CUDA, which looks great but still need a long time to converge. So we are going to optimize the path tracer code to make it faster and able to run in real time. Getting nice images in real-time is cool. 

References: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/