Proposed final project

-Mike Cammarano and Mike Nidel

Scene:

Figure 1: Rough overview of scene.

  A rough draft of the scene we would like to reproduce is shown in Figure 1. The centerpiece of this (only mildly contrived) still life is a clock that, at first glance, is very shiny. This seemingly simple property makes it an object of fascination to easily amused grad students. Upon close inspection, however, it becomes evident that there are a lot of interacting phenomena contributing to various aspects of the clock's shiny appearence, and we hope that modeling these in some depth will be fun (and potentially instructive).

  The lighting conditions shown in these photographs are relatively flat. We acquired these pictures in late afternoon, at a time when illumination in the room was mostly diffuse. It is interesting to observe the dramatic effect on this clock of changing lighting conditions over the course of a day - an effect that just seems to be crying out for a simulated time-lapse animation. However, while the lighting conditions shown here aren't necessarily the most interesting, they will suffice to illustrate the variety of light scattering effects in the scene.

  The most significant glossy/specular features in the clock are:

• the glossy highlight seen in the plastic outer casing.
• the near-perfect specular reflection off the curved glass cover, reflecting the environment.
• the highly anisotropic highlights in the brushed metal surface of the clock face (which also exhibits significant curvature at the edges). The metal is brushed in a spiral pattern.

Figure 2: Closeup of clock's glass face,
showing reflected environment and anisotropic
highlights.

  A significant feature of the scene that should not be overlooked is the rough texture of the background wall. We believe this adds considerable visual interest to the scene compared to, oh, say, a plain black background. The most challenging scene element, however, is the glass of water. In the glass itself, we see specular reflection of the environment. Next, we see complicated refractive effects as the glass and water act as a lens, distorting objects seen through the water. Finally, note how suitable lighting conditions produce bright, highly focused caustics. (see Figure 3 for a closeup of all these effects).

Figure 3: Closeup of glass and newspaper.
Note the refractive effect of the glass, and
the long narrow caustic cast to the left.

  The final element in the scene is the newspaper. Primarily, this adds detailed texture to the scene. However, it is important to notice that the newspaper isn't completely flat ... and it would probably look quite fake if we rendered it as if it were. This shouldn't require any especially complicated modeling - our existing heightfield primitive should allow us to describe the slight non-planarity of the paper just fine.

Our goals:

• Glossy highlights from plastic
• Specular reflection of the environment by curved surfaces
• Brushed metal with anisotropic reflections
• Rough surfaces
• Textured surfaces
• Cautics
• Modeling scene geometry

• All sorts of texture mapping variations.
  • Simple texture mapping (modulating diffuse surface color via texture lookup).
  • Bump mapping - in particular, a procedurally defined bump map for the wall surface, probably based on fractal noise.
  • Procedural mapping to modulate reflectance properties, to describe the brushed metal clock face (and the stencilled out numbers).
• Anisotropic reflective surfaces.
• Environment mapping.
• Photon mapping.