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This assignment focuses on extending a raytracer and ensuring the OpenGL framework is operational for future tasks, with a submission deadline of October 27, 2023. Although it is ungraded, select submissions may be showcased, and students are encouraged to explore various enhancements such as rendering glass objects, adding primitives, and implementing textures. Students must submit a .zip file containing source files, results, a screenshot, and a readme detailing their contributions and challenges faced.

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3 views

assignment_04

This assignment focuses on extending a raytracer and ensuring the OpenGL framework is operational for future tasks, with a submission deadline of October 27, 2023. Although it is ungraded, select submissions may be showcased, and students are encouraged to explore various enhancements such as rendering glass objects, adding primitives, and implementing textures. Students must submit a .zip file containing source files, results, a screenshot, and a readme detailing their contributions and challenges faced.

Uploaded by

d6aa8dfbb
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction to Computer Graphics

Assignment 4 – Raytracer Extensions and OpenGL “Hello World”


Submission deadline: 27.10.2023, 12:00
Late submissions are not accepted

This assignment gives you an opportunity to play around with and extend your raytracer. It is also
intended to ensure that you can build and run the OpenGL framework code we’ll be using for the upcoming
assignments. This assignment will not be graded, but we will select a few of the best submissions to
showcase in an upcoming exercise session. Please do make sure the OpenGL code is working on your
computer during this assignment; in later weeks, we will not provide assistance in setting up the code.
Here is a list of potential ideas for using or extending your raytracer:

• Set up an interesting scene. Create a new scene file/collection of meshes that produces a nice image.
You might consider downloading some free triangle meshes from an online service (e.g., sketchfab,
cgtrader, or turbosquid) or creating your own in Blender. Note that whatever mesh you use must be
converted to OFF format to be loaded into a scene. You can do this conversion with Blender.
• Render glass objects by implementing refraction. Refraction works similarly to reflection, though
you’ll need new formulas for computing the angle of the refracted ray (this can be done with Snell’s
law given the index of refraction of air and glass) and determining how to mix the reflected and
refracted colors (this can be done with the Fresnel equations). Implementation details can be found
in this article.
• Add a torus primitive and implement ray-torus intersections. You can take the same approach to
deriving the intersection equation as you did for cylinder intersections. However you will end up with
a quartic equation, not a quadratic one. You’ll likely want to use a numerical method to solve for
the smallest positive root of this equation instead of evaluating the rather complicated closed-form
root expressions (see Wikipedia).
• Generate a movie. An example of how to do this is provided in scenes/movie of last week’s
assignment code. On Linux and macOS, you should be able to open a terminal in this scene directory
and run bash gen_movie.sh (after installing ImageMagick and FFmpeg). This script assumes that
you built your raytracer binary in a build directory inside the main project directory. The script
feeds 90 different scene files into the raytracer to render each frame of animation and then stitches
the output frame images into a movie.
• Speed up the rendering of complex meshes by implementing a spatial acceleration structure as pre-
sented in the lecture, e.g., a bounding box hierarchy or BSP. Make your own or utilize existing
implementation, maybe from CGAL. Benchmark with a complex mesh and see how fast you can
make it.
• Implement a more complex surface lighting model, e.g., Oren-Nayar for diffuse light from rough
surfaces, or Cook-Torrance specular reflection.
• Implement textures – image-based or procedural. For this, modify the intersect() signature to
also compute texture coordinates. From this you can either compute a color (e.g. checkerboard
pattern) or sample an image texture. For loading images, see the next suggestion:

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Computer Graphics @ UniBE, Fall 2023 Assignment 4 – Raytracer Extensions and OpenGL “Hello World”

• Implement image backgrounds: Instead of taking a fixed background color for rays that do not
intersect with anything, take a value from an image based on the direction vector. You can find nice
free image textures for this at https://hdrihaven.com. To read image files, you can copy over
the LodePNG library from the SolarSystem project (let us know if you need support getting this to
compile; you’ll have to edit the CMakeLists.txt).

• (Advanced): Extend the ray tracer to a path tracer for more realistic results. A good resource is the
online edition of the book Physically Based Rendering.

Note that if you add new .cpp files for your implementation, you will need to edit src/CMakeLists.txt
to include them.

OpenGL Framework

Please download and unpack assignment_4.zip and see its README.md for instructions on building the
framework code. If all goes well, you should see the following window when you run the SolarSystem
binary:

Grading

This assignment is ungraded.

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Computer Graphics @ UniBE, Fall 2023 Assignment 4 – Raytracer Extensions and OpenGL “Hello World”

What to hand in

A compressed .zip file with the following contents:

• The source files that you added or changed in the raytracer.

• The results of your work, e.g., images or movie you created.

• A screenshot of the running OpenGL assignment code.

• A readme.txt file containing the full names of each team member, describing what you added to
or did with the raytracer this week. Please also tell us any difficulties you encountered in getting the
OpenGL framework running.

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