LiAR isn’t a raytracer

It’s been a while since my last update. Two months to be exact. What have I been doing in that time? Not that much … I’ve been struggling with lights … How do lights fit in the grand design of a ray tracer? Are they objects? Are they shaders? Or even something completely different? I’ve [...]

A render of the new PHD-Motosports skin for the FZR. Wimz is doing an amazing job on those skins. There’s a nice detail you can’t see from this point of view: the driver’s name with a little Belgian flag. Great! The cars are rendered with depth of field for a more realistic image … Model [...]

Some time ago, I mentioned I was implementing depth of field in LiAR. Well, I finally managed to code and test it. The following image illustrates the depth of field effect. The left part is rendered by a pinhole camera, the right part by a camera with a circular lens. You can find the script [...]

This week, I’ve been mostly rendering … cars. It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve been rendering cars for PHD-Motorsports. The setup is rather simple. The same triangle mesh is instantiated three times with a different skin. There are three point lights: a pure white key light in the front left corner, a [...]

A render of a low poly owl modeled by Wim Verbrugghe. The vertex normals are generated using the smoothNormals() function that’s now available on TriangleMesh. However, this seems to bugger up the wings, so the wings use face normals instead.

This day, I’ve been mostly rendering … bunnies That’s right, I can import models in PLY format now. This format is used by the Standford University Computer Graphics Laboratory for its ever-popular 3D Scanning Repository. The importer is written as a python script src/tools/ply.py. There’s also an example in examples/tools. (model by Stanford University Computer [...]

You can’t properly render fast cars without motion blur, can you? Motion blur is something that’s already in LiAR’s feature set for some time, so I tried it out on the triangle mesh. And here it is …*drumroll* … This is a scaled down/cropped version of a 2000×1500 image with 16 samples per pixel. This [...]

I’ve managed to get the triangle mesh rendering correct now … But it is waaaaay to slow … Currently there’s an AABB tree in there for spatial subdivision, but apparently, that’s not a good choice. I’m trying to clean up the triangle mesh’s source code a bit so I can commit it to the CVS. [...]

I’ve been trying to hack together a triangle mesh today. I think i’ve must have made a mistake somewhere … :( Well, tomorrow is another day … PS: tomz, I don’t have the texture for that car!

On Mercury’s request, I’ve been playing with ray differentials and texture filtering this week. Ray differentials are essentially derivatives of the viewing ray with respect to the image plane. They give us an estimation of how much of the surface being hit is covered by one pixel on the image plane, the ray’s “footprint”. This [...]