Visual Computer Seminar Round Up

Sorry for this super late post.. But I believe half of us were busy preparing for tests these 2 weeks so I delayed a little (they just ended BTW, hooray!)

Ok enough for excuses.. This seminar round up is for Visual Computing. Overall, what interest me the most during the seminar was the technique of ray tracing! Ray tracing is a physics base model that simulates light rays, as demonstrated in the picture below:

For instance, this is how does an image look like with and without ray tracing. It is from the popular animation movie, Cars, by Pixar:

Quoted from davidhailes, "Ray-tracing is a type of global illumination like radosity. When light rays hit an object, one of three different things can happen, these are absorption, reflection and refraction. In 3D applications Ray-Tracing creates this illusion. Basically it traces rays (hence the name ray-tracing) from the camera back through the image plane into the scene."

Radiosity is a global illumination algorithm which is used in 3D computer graphics rendering.

And what about illumination? There are 2 types of illumination models namely:

• Global illumination: models interchange of lights between all surfaces.
• Local illumination: single light, single surface interaction

and this would be the global illumination image

As you may notice, the isolation between object and another object is less obvious and there's a higher degree of realism with the reflection of sun ray and shades.Global illumination renderers transform local illumination render to a realistic-looking image. The scene is rendered more accurately because as in real life, nothing is isolated. Object are lit from the light source, and then become a source of light themselves. For instance, a green wall will give a green tint to objects that are close to it.

I think the artists are all amazing as according to Mr. Sim, rendering an image could take up to a few days! Those artists must be really passionate and proud or their artwork. But most of the time, I still cannot tell the difference between a rendered image and a real image, that's how close they look like! Out of so many rendered images, I would like to share with you guys one of my favorites (simply b/c it looks so real):

Again, this is a rendered image!

References:

• Rendering, Davidhailes, June 26, 2008 (from: http://davidhailes.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/rendering/)
• Global Illumination, Rastermon (from: http://www.rastermon.com/index.htm)