JVillella

A Few New Renders…

jvillella — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:55:04 +0000

I have been working on a short-film using Blender-Cycles for the past week or so. I decided to take a few frames from it, spice them up and post them on my blog. Let me know what you think!

This one is the same image as above just with a subtle cross-processing effect and a vignette.

SiFrax v0.2a

jvillella — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:30:57 +0000

Over the past 2 weeks I have been working on my Computer Sciences end-year project. I decided to make a fractal explorer allowing the user to navigate 2D and 3D fractals. It was made in Java only because that is the course requirement. I much rather have done it in C++ so we could get some real time rendering. It is still not too too slow however, as I have threaded it.

I use the ray marching technique to render the fractals as it seems to be quite fast, clean and efficient. Below I have listed most of the software’s key features as well as links to the executable and source (It is licensed under the GPL v3). Feel free to fiddle around with SiFrax (its name) or you can read up on how to use it by going to “Help”->”How To…” on the top menu bar.

I just want to mention one nice thing about the “underneath” side of the program for the software developers reading this. I have designed in such a way that one could eaily write their own number system (i.e. Bicomplex numbers), and pass an instance of an object of that type to the RayMarcher.SetNumberSystem(…) method. And just like that (s)he can render the exact same shape using his/her own number system. (S)he just has to adhere to the NumberSystem interface. This was a little tricky to code with Java. I used some polymorphism and generic programming to get it done. You can see how I did it for yourself in the source code below. I would love to hear your comments on the software! Thanks for reading!

Features

Full navigation
2D and 3D dimensions
Customizable materials
Several fractal shapes
- Mandelbulb
- Mandelbrot
- Julia Set
Several number systems
- Complex
- Triplex
- Quaternion
Multi-threaded for faster rendering
Cross-platform
Fast Navigation
Ability to save pictures
Extremely easy to use
Open-sourced under the GPL v3

Images

I took all of these frames with the built-in save image feature.

Download

Here is the source code: SiFrax v0.2a source code via Dropbox

I have also included the JCreator project files just to make it a bit faster to get the source up and running if you have JCreator on you computer.

Here is the executable (.jar): SiFrax v0.2a executable via Dropbox

Most will want this one–> Here is the executable (.jar) for jre6: SiFrax v0.2a jre6 executable via Dropbox

I haven’t tried running this on Mac OS, but I don’t see why it would not work. Just let me know if it doesn’t in the comment box below and I will make the necessary changes.

October 23, Ray Tracer Update

jvillella — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:12:56 +0000

Man oh man, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted about my ray tracer. Rest assured it’s still in development. I’ve been coding like mad in my free time and I’ve implemented quite a few new features. More important though, I completely rewrote the architecture. Its a much cleaner and logical design and it can support many, many new features. Below are some “tech-demo” images. Their purpose is just to show new features, not for an impressive display of my ray tracer. I’ll also outline the current features and what is planned for the near future. I’m hoping to distribute a working copy for public testing. More on that later though.

Current Features:

Cameras:

Fish Eye
Pinhole
Thin Lens (DoF)
Orthographic

Samplers:

Regular (grid-like)
Pure Random
Jittered

Accelerators:

Regular Grid
SAH Kd-Tree (in development)

BxDFs:

Lambertian

Materials:

Matte

Integrators:

Whitted-Style Ray Tracing
Path Tracing

Geometric Objects:

Sphere
Open Cylinder
Plane
Disk
Triangle
Triangle Mesh (.ply)

Smooth Shading
Solid (Flat) Shading

Lights:

Point Light
Area Light

Transformations:

Scale
Rotate
Translate

Planned Features:

Geometric Objects:

Triangle Mesh (.obj)

Smooth Shading
Solid (Flat) Shading

BxDFs:

Perfect Specular

Materials:

Mirror
Glossy

Lights:

Environment Light

Tech-Demo Pictures:

Before showing these pics I would like to mention that there are some nasty bugs within my code. I put them on my todo list. I won’t mention them all, but there is a tiny handful. See if you can guess them!

Site Clean Up!

jvillella — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:18:13 +0000

Things are getting messy and it is time for a really late spring clean up. I’m gonna be cleaning up the site, organizing it, updating it and posting some new content over the next few days. And when I say new content I mean some awesome new info on my ray tracer. I have gone ahead and re-wrote it from the ground up. There are tons of new features and hopefully I can release a stable version for the public to test on their computers. I do have to squash a few bugs and add a few more features first. Anyways that’s it for now and if you have any suggestions for the site, please post them below. I would love to hear.

Ray Tracer Update

jvillella — Sat, 14 May 2011 20:54:40 +0000

Hello everyone. Just wanted to provide on update on how my ray tracer is going (actually now it’s path tracer). I started the project on March 18, 2011. Development is going pretty rapid, and its truly amazing to experience the creation of large-scale piece of software. The current features I have implemented are as follows,

Lambertian BRDF
Blinn Phong BRDF
Surface Emission
Very simple implementation of Stochastic Anti-Aliasing
Ray-Sphere Intersection
Ray-Plane Intersection
Ray-Triangle Intersection (Moller’s Method)
and Finally, Path Tracing!

Im using the FreeImage library for creating the bitmaps. The code is completely in C++. The features i am currently working on include,

Specular Reflection
Specular Transmission
Russian Roulette
Importance Sampling

The acceleration techniques are in very early development at the moment. Im still studying how they work and how to implement them. Once I finish with these features I want to implement,

Gloss BRDF
.obj Importer
Some sort of Acceleration Structures (ie. kd trees)
Graphic User Interface (GUI)
More Path Tracing Efficiency/Acceleration Techniques

This is obviously a long-time project. Long-time as in I want to work on it for the years to come. The more I learn and the more time I get, the more features and improvements my ray tracer will have. I have posted a few images below of early development and what the ray tracer is capable of rendering now. I would love to hear what you guys think so far, any questions, and/or any ideas you want to contribute. Thanks for reading

This is one of the first images rendered with my software. It was done a week or so after I started the project. It’s simple Lambertian shading with a single point light source.

This image was done on April 21, 2011. This is soon after I got specular reflection and shadows working. If I remember correctly the max bounces in this scene is 20. This is Whitted Ray Tracing.

This was done shortly after the previous image. As you can see this is the beginnings of specular transmission.

This is an image when I finally got path tracing working. It is an amazing feeling when I finally got it working. Notice the Diffuse-Interflection (the red sphere bleeding its colour on the grey walls. The image was rendered on May 9th. The red sphere is using a Lambertian BRDF and the green sphere is emitting light. The white at the top is actually a plane with some emission.

This was rendered the day after I got path tracing working. The image took just under 70 minutes with 300 samples. Just recently I made a few small optimizations to my algorithm and cut down the render time to half.

New Project: Ray Tracer

jvillella — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:13:41 +0000

Hello everyone, since a few weeks back I begun work on designing and coding a ray tracer in C++. I decided to make a new section of my site dedicated to my software development. This is my first project that will go under this new “Software” section. I’ll be posting progress images and information, new ideas and features and any other related news about my ray tracer. Id appreciate any comments, ideas or questions about my ray tracer. As of now, I have an idea where I want to take it, but it’s still very young in its years and I just want to bring it up to speed to today’s ray tracers before I begin work on making it different or distinct.

Bugatti Veyron

jvillella — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:31:30 +0000

I have been working on this car whenever I had some spare time. It got dragged on for quite a while, and i just wanted to get it finished. Near the end I lost all motivation and just wanted to get it finished. I found that I had learnt a lot about Subsurface Modelling whilst making this car. So I ended up spending half my time fixing mistakes I made when I began modelling it. I used Blender 2.55 (Ya i know 2.56 has been out for a while. I started the car on 2.55 and I have LuxRender and a few other plugins nicely set-up on 2.55. So I haven’t bothered to switch yet…Maybe 2.57 I will. I hear it comes out this month) I used Octane for the Ray Tracing and GIMP to adjust colour levels and add my name. The HDRi map is from 3D Total. I would like to know what you guys think of the car. I’m hoping to start a short film with Blender and Octane. I got a few ideas but nothing concrete and no story boards or anything yet. Hopefully I can start that soon.

Philco Radio

jvillella — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:31:28 +0000

This is my image using Octane Render. I greatly increased the DOF to give it a miniature look. Like usual, the model was done on Blender 2.55. The textures are from CGTextures and the HDRi is from openfootage.net. I slightly adjusted the contrast levels of the image in GIMP. Let me know what you think in the comments box below. Thanks!

“One or more textures on this 3D-model have been created with images from CGTextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default. Please visit www.cgtextures.com for more information.”

Bathroom Sink

jvillella — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:24:01 +0000

I finally purchased Octane Render a few days ago. I must say I am extremely impressed even on my slightly old graphics card. I made this model on Blender 2.55. The textures are from CGTextures.com and the HDRi is from zbyg on devientART. Lastly, I added a softglow filter on GIMP. Anyways let me know what you think of it in the comments box below. Thanks!

A Little Leak

jvillella — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:29:21 +0000

My 3rd piece of 2011 is entitled “A Little Leak”. Clearly the Fire Hydrant is leaking, but just a little from underneath. I modeled it in Blender 2.55, rendered it in LuxRender 0.8 and did a bit of Post-Pro in GIMP. Textures are from cgtextures.com Its not supposed to be completely realistic. I want it to have a cartoon feel, but not overbearing. Anyways let me know what you think in the comments box below. Thanks!