Preliminary Project Presentations, Part 1

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• Misc
  • GREAT Day
    • Tuesday (Apr. 21)
    • Extra credit similar to colloquia for summary/reaction to any one math talk or poster
    • ... Or for any one UpStat talk
• Questions?
• Project Presentations
  • Participating Media: Jacob Goldberg, Tom Hartvigsen, Tyler Sherman
    • Participating media involves environmental factors that affect image
    • e.g., fog, dust, smoke; scattering of light from same; maybe effects of hot air near ground
    • Could also include environments that emit light, e.g., flames
    • Goal is to extend ray tracer to include at least some of these effects
  • Areal Lights: Aidan Murphy
    • Imagine a flat region in space, e.g., a circle, emitting light
    • This would produce, for example, soft-edged shadows
    • Can calculate effect by tracing light rays from several samples of light-emitting area
    • Sampling could be weighted to emphasize brighter regions, e.g., if light source is the whole daytime sky
  • Physically-Based Animation: David Baker, Dan Krolikowski
    • Basic goal is to have transformations that vary with time, e.g., translations, rotations, deformation via scaling
    • This could be extended to objects represented by polygon meshes that can deform if there’s time
    • Variation with time allows making movies consisting of multiple images ray-traced at different (simulated) times
    • Vector equations for distance between objects and relative directions of motion help with detecting collisions between moving objects
    • Equations for motion can include physical laws such as conservation of energy or momentum
  • Tesselation of Spline Surfaces: Simon Nash
    • Motivation: triangles easy to intersect, NURBS aren’t, but describe a much wider range of surfaces
    • So how do you build a mesh of triangles that approximate a surface while keeping the number of triangles reasonably low
    • Various sorts of surface description based on selected “control points” and weights on them
      • NURBS = Non-uniform rational basis spline
      • Bezier curves/surfaces
    • Basic implementation idea is a pipeline of simpler surface representations
  • There is a Google doc for sharing sources; please put yours in it
• Next
  • Finish project presentations

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