CS 248 Spring 1995 Rendering Competition

CS 248 Spring 1995 Rendering Competition

CS 248 - Introduction to Computer Graphics
Spring quarter, 1995
Instructor: Marc Levoy
Teaching assistants: Apostolos Lerios, Chase Garfinkle, and Todd Smith

The original stills (after JPEG compression) can be retrieved by clicking on the corresponding thumbnail.


Rob Engle and Andrea Rosso


Rob and Andrea's competition entry was an MPEG movie (1.7MB) totaling approximately 1600 frames, and rendered in 3 hours. (Note: The MPEG encoding is responsible for glitches in the movie; the individual frames do not contain stray polygons or any other visual artifacts.)

During the movie, the name of their renderer (RAGE: Rob and Andrea's Graphics Engine) is gradually formed by flying letters, which circle the earth or are carried by a jumping vase and a spaceship; the motion is controlled by Rob and Andrea's self-designed animation system. Then, the letters spin around, as the per-pixel shader sweeps a plane over the image, turning gradually color renderings into black and white ones.

The movie frame shown above depicts Rob and Andrea's logo. The letters were modeled using "showcase," a package which is part of the SGI software distribution. Four textures were used to modify the color of each letter.

This is also a frame from their movie, illustrating motion blur of a flying spaceship. The primary feature of Rob and Andrea's animation system is flexibility: for each time step and each object in the scene, a (user-defined) Tcl procedure creates a transformation matrix for the object. By clever composition of scale, shear, translate and rotate commands in Tcl, the objects can move in graceful, complex, and surprising ways.

This is a rendering of an object that Rob and Andrea used in their movie. It is a vase texture mapped using cylindrical coordinates with a (scanned) marble texture.


Last update: 14 June 1995 by Apostolos "Toli" Lerios
tolis@cs.stanford.edu