Mark Schmelzenbach Final Project CS684

This assignment required us to play amatuar photographer. Using the departments digital camera, we were to set up and capture a still-life scene, then duplicate the scene with our raytracer.

I learned two primary lessons with this assignment: First: Write down all measurements no matter how insignificant they may seen at the time. Second: Don't get your wisdom teeth pulled during finals week.

The scene I photographed has a patterned cloth underlay, the set of Glassner's books which were an invaluable reference during the class, and (for mood) a candle.

Originally, I was going to have the scene solely ilumminated by the candle, but I could not get the digital camera to 'expose the film' long enought to obtain enough light to get an image. So, this scene is illuminated by a bank of flourecent lights off the image plane.

Actually, looking at the image now, I realize that the candle burned out by the time I took this image anyway. So, enough babble: here is the original image:

I took the liberty of cropping the image slightly, since the underlay turned out to be wrinkled which is something I did not want to try to emulate with geometry!
If you want to see the uncropped image, click here.

The current scene I have rendered does not make the candle holder glass. This is because I am still having difficulties in rendering it (Total internal reflection is too common, and the multiple bounces turns the majority of the candle holder black...I am thinking of putting in a crude hack that fires a refraction ray into the scene if the limit is reached rather than terminating).
The candle holder itself was created in Imagine3D, a pretty good modeller for the IBM PC. This model is a lathed surface, with both inside and outside polygons specified. It was modelled from measurements taken from the actual object, and so is reasonably close the the real item.
The books are actually boxes, but their dimensions are correct.
In the current 'work in progress,' there is no specular component being rendered. This is obvious along the top of the book, which has a glare in the digital image, but is clear in the rendered version.
The original camera position was estimated, since I lost the exact specs for this image. As such, the camera of the rendered image was determined largely through trial and error (mostly error).

This image was rendered at 25 samples per pixel.
When available, a completed version complete with 'real' glass candle holder can be viewed here.