Volume Rendering Project Proposal

Computer Graphics II
UC San Diego (CSE 168)

Hi there! For my final project in CSE 168 I am planning to implement volumetric rendering in my existing path tracer. This would likely take the form of a new integrator that will eventually render both homogenous and heterogenous volumes defined by bounding boxes / spheres.

Seeing the examples of rendered smoke clouds in lecture, I was inspired to try and recreate the album art for one of my favorite band's albums. Using an STL model of the central sculpture, and a few simple boxes / quadlights, I was able to model the image in blender. From Blender I have exported an .obj file and modified the program from the previous homeworks to read said file.

As far as the beginnings of rendering the smoke, I have been working on an absorption function. The algorithm currently handles volumes by continuing to cast the ray if the material intersected is marked as part of a volume, and marking the distance traveled within the volume. Eventually, when a surface other than a volume is hit, the path tracer resumes as normal, and all the later bounces are combined and multiplied by an absorption coefficient. As you can see there are some issues with shape edges and how the box is composed of triangles rather than being a box itself, all things I will be looking to fix in the two weeks.