Final Rendering

Goals

The main goal of this assignment is to independently set up and render a scene of your choice. Of course, it's certainly okay to ask for help! I just want you to practice going through the setup on your own and develop your own graphics programs from scratch. This assignment is also an opportunity to be creative with the course concepts, or to investigate a topic in more depth.

Before getting started, you should find someone to work with since this assignment will be completed in pairs.

Define your scene

With your partner, sketch out the scene you would like to render, and make sure everyone in your group is excited about this scene. You can find assets (meshes, textures) using some of the websites listed in Lab 5.

Try to keep the total number of triangles less than 10,000. If you need to, you can decimate the model using MeshLab (see the link in Lab 5).

You'll need to determine a point to "look at" and where the eye should be located. Think about averaging all the model vertices to get some central point to look at (to get started). Then offset the eye from this point in some chosen direction.

You can also add some analytic shapes, like an infinite plane or large sphere if you want to render things like the ground.

You should also determine if there will be any motion in your scene. Do you want someone to click and drag the HTMLCanvas to interact with the scene? Do you want the arrow keys to control the view? Do you want to animate your models?

How do you want to shade your model? Do you want to use a flat shading technique (using the triangle normals) or do you want to interpolate vertex normals (using barycentric coordinates) to compute the normal at a ray-triangle intersection? Do you want to texture the surfaces? If so, how (procedural or using our cut-and-paste model)?

Requirements

Uses ray tracing.
Contains a model with at least 250 triangles.
Uses a BVH to accelerate the intersections between your model triangles and any rays you cast into the scene. The code from the in-class exercise in Week 6 (see the solution in the slides) would be a good starting point for this.
Casts some form of secondary ray in your rendering. In other words, you should use at least one of: shadow rays, mirror rays or refractive rays.
Uses multiple samples per pixel (spp). You should also report the time it takes to render each frame for various spp (also mention the canvas size) in a README.md file, just like we did in Lab 2.
Uses some form of texturing. This doesn't necessarily mean you need to paste an image onto your model. It could also mean a procedural texture, or if you want to use an image as the background. For example, instead of using a constant color for the sky (when the ray hits nothing in the scene), use the ray to look up the color from an image (see the giraffe examples below).
Implements some variant of the Phong reflection model, however, you can omit the specular term if it isn't relevant for your scene. Report all the parameters in a README.md file that you used.

If there is something else you want to explore (like a topic related to rasterization, which would use WebGL), please come and talk to me during office hours about this.

Submission

Stage 1 (due April 11th): submit the group members form here. Only 1 group member needs to submit the form, but everyone can submit it if you want. This form will be used to create the GitHub repositories for you to work in.
Stage 2 (due April 18th): submit a 1-paragraph proposal which describes your scene setup and references to any assets (meshes, textures) you will use. Be as specific as possible and also submit a hand-drawn sketch of what you will render. Submit the proposal using this Canvas assignment.
Stage 3 (due May 9th, now optional): submit your final image and code. Please start by accepting this GitHub assignment and then coordinate with your group member(s) about creating a Team (1 person should create the team, then others should join). I would also strongly suggest using the VS Code Live Share extension to collaborate with your group member(s). Submit your code using the Final Rendering assignment on Gradescope and please include a picture of your rendering in your repository.