Description:

This program adds a thin lens camera to the ray tracer. A thin lens camera mimics the focusing and blurring effects of a real camera. The image is in focus only at one plane and objects are blurry behind and in front of that plane.

Method:

In order to create blurring, the eye is "jittered" within a lens plane. For each pixel in the raster, sample points are generated for both the lens and the pixel. These sample points are combined randomly to form rays from various points on the lens to points within the pixel. The movement of the eye point on the lens causes the image to look blurred where objects are not at the focus plane. The location of the focus plane is determined by the distance from the eye to the screen as set by the user.

These features were added to the basic pinhole camera, which takes care of the perspective transformation.

This image was generated using the thin lens camera. The spheres are of equal size. The dimensions are 512 x 512. 256 samples were used per pixel. Cubic spline filtering was used for both lens samples. and pixel samples. The lens size is 0.3 (units not calculated).

This is the same image as above, generated using a simple pinhole camera.

This image was generated using the thin lens camera. The spheres are of equal size. The dimensions are 512 x 512. 256 samples were used per pixel. Cubic spline filtering was used for both lens samples. and pixel samples. The lens size is 0.6 (units not calculated).

This is the same image as above, generated using a simple pinhole camera.