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Submitted by , posted on 09 March 2005
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Image Description, by
It's a been a while since a good 'ol fashioned ray tracer has featured as an
IOTD, so I thought I'd add my contribution!
Igneus is a global illumination renderer which I am currently developing for my
final-year BSc computer science project at Swansea university in the UK. The
project is a follow-up to a real-time engine I built during my first year, and
which I submitted as an IOTD a couple of years ago. I was inspired to
write Igneus after seeing the efforts of the many talented programmers
developing their own open-source renderers (notably Sunflow, RISE and PANE).
I've been working on the project for about 6 months now and it's finally
starting to produce satisfactory renders (although there's still a lot of room
from improvement!). The features Igneus currently supports are:
Full global illumination using Jensen's photon mapping techniques
Full global illumination using path tracing
Sub-surface scattering and translucency
Texture mapping
Depth-of-field blur with customisable "circles-of-confusion"
Soft shadows
High dynamic range radiance maps
Transmission with refraction
Procedural texture shaders (Perlin noise, etc)
Octree-accelerated polygon mesh objects
Metaballs and other implicit surfaces
High quality adaptive anti-aliasing
The main image is a test render demonstrating caustic photon mapping. The scene
is composed of three Utah teapots and one PQ torus knot. A slight depth of field
blur is also applied to add a little more realism. The lower-left render is of
Jensen's cardioid caustic cylinder. The crisp edges on the focused caustic
highlight the Gaussian filter used in the photon density estimation. Finally,
the lower-right image demonstrates the sub-surface scattering algorithm applied
to an alien figure I modeled in MAX. (Apologies for the otherwise simplistic
scenes; I'm not a 3D modeler so I'm quite restricted as to what I can come up
with. If anybody has a model they'd like to see rendered by Igneus, drop me an
e-mail! :-)
Many more renders together with a full feature list, dev diary, reading list and
links to other renderers can be found at my site: www.igneus.co.uk.
Any comments, critiques or suggestions would be very welcome (and would help
with my project dissertation!).
Thanks,
Ben Spencer
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