Assignment 3: Camera Simulation

Due: Thursday May 4th, 11:59PM

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Please add a link to your final writeup on Assignment3Submission.

lenses

Description

Many rendering systems approximate the light arriving on the film plane by assuming a pin-hole camera, which produces images where everything that is visible is sharp. In contrast, real cameras contain multi-lens assemblies with different imaging characteristics such as limited depth of field, field distortion, vignetting and spatially varying exposure. In this assignment, you'll extend pbrt with support for a more realistic camera model that accurately simulates these effects.

Specifically, we will provide you with data about real wide-angle, normal and telephoto lenses, each composed of multiple lens elements. You will build a camera plugin for pbrt that simulates the traversal of light through these lens assemblies. With this camera simulator, you'll explore the effects of focus, aperture and exposure. Using these data you can optimize the performance of your simulator considerably. Once you have a working camera simulator, you will add auto-focus capabilities to your camera.

Step 1: Background Reading

Please re-read the paper "A Realistic Camera Model for Computer Graphics" by Kolb, Mitchell, and Hanrahan.

Step 2: Implement a Compound Lens Simulator

Copy this zip file to a directory at the same as the directory containing the 'core' directory. This archive contains the following:

Modify the stub file, realistic.cpp, to trace rays from the film plane through the lens system supplied in the .dat files. The following is a suggested course of action, but feel free to proceed in the way that seems most logical to you:

Here are some example images rendered with 512 samples per pixel: From left to right: telephoto, normal, wide angle and fisheye. Notice that the wide angle image is especially noisy -- why is that? Hint: look at the ray traces at the top of this web page.

hw3telephoto_512_sm hw3dgauss_512_sm hw3wide_512_sm hw3fisheye_512_sm

Some conventions:

Hints:

Step 3: Play around with Cameras

Step 4: Autofocus

Step 5: Submission

Assignment3 (last edited 2006-05-08 07:41:23 by RanjithaKumar)