Stencyling Around

Both taken with my 17-55 at f/2.8 and ISO 1600.

On the final day, I’ve added in normal mapping, a more advanced form of bump mapping. Like bump mapping, it gives objects a more realistic “3D” effect, and it does this by modifying the surface normals in the diffuse lighting calculations. It grabs this information from a special image by taking its RGB components and treating them as the XYZ components of the surface normal.

The result? Have a look and compare.

Notice in the floor that it has little grooves in it. The same can be seen in the spheres. Now compare to the old one. (Yes, the sphere got textured in the new one.)

A pretty big difference I must say.

While I’m finished with this raytracer for now, there are other features I’d like to return to later or perhaps in my final class project.

• Anti-Aliasing
• Soft Shadows
• Area Lights
• Diffuse Reflections
• Caustics
• Parallax Mapping
• Depth of Field
• Motion Blur
• More Primitives
• Interaction - Move the camera around
• Real-Time Ray Tracing

All in all, a time consuming but fun project. Before I close this off, how about a look at what else I made?

Other Final Scenes

A Look Back…

Day 1: Setup, Spheres and Constant Shading

Day 2: Phong Shading and Lighting

Day 3: Reflections, Shadows and Infinite Planes

Day 4: Scene File Format, Refraction and Triangles

Day 5: Transformations and Instancing

Day 6: Texture Mapping

Day 7: Normal Mapping and Final Touches