COMP 557 - Fall 2009 - Assignment 4
Ray Tracing

In this assignment, you will write a raytracer. Note that there is no written part to this assignment. The sample code on webCT will get you started with an XML scene file parser and code to write PNG image file. You are free to make any modifications and extensions that you please, to both the XML format, parser code, and the ray tracing code; however, your code should still work with the simple examples provided, and likewise, any changes you make must be well documented in your readme file.

XML scene description

The XML file is organized as sequence of named materials, lights, cameras, nodes, and renders. The main scene is defined in the node with the name "root". In general you will only need to have one node defined, and it must have the name "root", but nodes can also be referred to within the scene graph hierarchy as an instance (i.e., to help you reuse parts of the scene hierarchy multiple times).

The scene nodes each have an associated transformation. The node definition can contain a list of transformations (translation, rotx, roty, rotz, and scale (and others if you choose to add them)). These transformations are applied in order to build the node transformation (note in SceneNode.java how the transforms are applied in the order in which they are parsed from the file). The node can also list a number of different kinds of geometry (sphere, cube, mesh, instance). Finally, the node can also contain a list of child nodes, allowing a hierarchy of transformations and geometry to be built.

Look at the two examples provided to get a better idea of how the scene description files are organized. Please share your test scenes on WebCT. Note again that you may also need to implement additional tags and attributes as you proceed through the objectives.

Provided Code

A4App opens an xml document and calls the Scene constructor to load the scene definition from the xml file. It then calls the scene render method to produce an image file. This render method is a good place to start making changes to the code, but you will need to make lots of changes to many classes, and make new classes on your own. You've been provided with basic classes for defining a materials, lights, and nodes, but they do nothing but hold loaded data. A Ray class and an intersection result have been defined for your convenience, but you may wish or need to change them. They are defined to allow the Intersectable interface to be defined. The sphere, cube, plane, mesh, or any other geometry (or node) that can be intersected will implement this interface.

Optional Competition

There will be optional competition for images created with your raytracer. You do not submit an image if you do not want to participate. To participate, you should submit an image, and a short description describing the technical achievements and/or artist statement for your submission. Submit the image and statement with your assignment. A small jury will judge submissions based on aesthetics, creativity, and technical merit.

1. Generate Rays

   The sample takes you up to the point where you need to compute the rays to intersect with the scene. Use the camera definition to build the rays you need to cast into the scene. You should have a default background for when rays do not intersect objects, and this should not be a solid colour. Choose some pleasing background colour based on your ray direction or pixel coordinate.

2. Sphere Intersection (2 marks)

   The simplest scene includes a single sphere at the origin. Write the code to perform the sphere intersection and set the colour to be either black or white depending on the result (i.e., don't worry about lighting in this first step). Implement an additional position attribute for the sphere tag so that you can create a scene with several spheres at different positions without using the transformation tags (see step 7). For instance, <sphere radius="0.5" position="0 0 0" material="red"/>.

3. Lighting and Shading (2 marks)

   Modify your code so that you're always keeping track of the closest intersection, and the material, and the normal. Use this information to compute the colour of each pixel by summing the contribution of each of the lights in the xml file. You should implement ambient, diffuse Lambertian, and Blinn-Phong specular illumination models as discussed in class.

4. Shadows

   Modify your lighting code to compute a shadow ray, and test that the light is not occluded before applying computing and adding the light contribution in the previous step. Make sure your shadows work with multiple lights.

5. Cube

   Add code to create an intersectable Cube object. The cube should be axis aligned, centered at the origin, and with edges of length specified in the XML file, i.e., <cube size="1" material="red">. You may alternatively consider providing in XML the lower left and upper right corner of an axis aligned rectangular solid.

6. Triangle Meshes

   The provided code includes the polygon soup loader from the previous assignment. You can use this loader, or extend it, or write something new to load the obj file specified in the mesh XML nodes. Note that you do not have vertex normals by default, so flat shaded triangles are fine (though Phong shading would be nice).

7. Hierarchy and Instances

   Use the transformations defined in the scene nodes to transform the rays before intersecting the geometry and child nodes. Be sure to also transform the normals of the intersection result that you return to the caller. Implement the instance tag to reuse named subtrees of the hierarchy. Do something reasonable with the material definition of an instance (i.e., replace the material of the intersection, or modulate the colours).

8. Create a Novel Scene

   Create a unique scene of your own. Be creative. Try to have some amount of complexity to make it interesting (i.e., different shapes and different materials). Your scene should demonstrate all features of your ray tracer. Note that there will be a separate submission for the ray tracing competition later in the term.

9. Bonus (10%)

   Implement some extra feature (or features) in your ray tracer, and make sure that it is something of some minimum difficulty if you want to receive full bonus marks. Here is a list of thing you might consider, but note that the items have been adjusted from the original posting of this assignment to account for the new requirements of the combined fourth and fifth assignments

   • Adaptive per pixel jittered super sampling
   • Fresnel Reflection
   • Refraction and Fresnel term
   • Motion blur
   • Depth of field blur
   • Spot lights
   • Area lights (i.e.,soft shadows)
   • Procedural volume textures
   • Environment maps
   • Textured mapped meshes (adaptive sampling or even mipmaps would be useful here)
   • Bump maps
   • transparency and compositing
   • Acceleration techniques (hierarchical bounding volumes, parallelization).
   • Quadrics
   • Other implicit surfaces (e.g., metaballs)
   • Subdivision surfaces
   • Bezier surface patches
   • Constructive Solid Geometry
   • Something else totally awesome

Final Submission Format (read carefully)

You should create and submit a document (either a web page, pdf, or odt file), and submit this along with your assignment submission. This page should contains images that clearly demonstrate each requirement of the assignment, along with a demonstration of each of the extra features you implemented. If you submit a web page, you should submit the files, and not just the link! If you submit a document, the rendered images should be provided as png files with appropriate names.

While you could probably create one image to show all of your features at once, it is suggested that you take some time to create a variety of nice test scenes and render several images. You will probably want to use simple test scenes at each stage of the assignment for your own debugging purposes, so keep these scenes and the results for your submission web page. Ideally, images should be plain and simple to demonstrate individual features. Other images could be more complex to demonstrate a creative use of your software to generate interesting images.

Each image in your submitted document must include a caption that gives the name of the xml scene file you used to generate the image, the computation time to generate the image, a list of features demonstrated in the image, and any additional comments. You may also want to list your hardware and operating system in the document to help give meaning to the timings for each image. Note that the images should be rendered at a reasonable size, for instance, 640x480 is sufficient for showing many of the features, but you may optionally want to compute higher resolution images for your final scene, but do not go higher than 1920x1200.

Note that the TA will also be running your code, but will not have the time to render all your tests, so a large part of the evaluation of your assignment will be by inspection of images in the submitted documents. Submitting an image that was not generated by your code is considered cheating. Your raytracer may take a long time to generate any given image, thus the TAs will only selectively run specific examples, and it is largely on your honor that the images you show are yours (do not violate this trust).

Be sure to document your extra feature or features in your readme!

Great! Submit your source code as a zip file, along with everything else, via webCT. Be sure to include a readme.txt file as requested. DOUBLE CHECK your submitted files by downloading them from WebCT. You can not recieve any marks for assignments with missing or corrupt files!

Note that you are encouraged to discuss assignments with your classmates, but not to the point of sharing code and answers. All code must be your own.