Soft Peaks
The effects of smoothing on ray reflections
L.F.W. Furer (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Ricardo Guerra Marroquim – Mentor (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Y. Chen – Mentor (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Daniel A.A. Pelsmaeker – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Programming Languages)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
The micro detail on surfaces can have a profound effect on how rays bounce of it. In ray tracing, this micro-surface is normally approximated with statistical models. We wish to figure out what the effect of normal interpolation and Phong tessellation is on how rays reflect on the surface. This has been Done by creating a ray tracers from scratch, that uses height fields, with normal interpolation and Phong tessellation. This ray tracer has then been used to render 3 different micro-surfaces, which were compared in order to understand the difference. The conclusion of this research was that both smoothing techniques had little to no effect on the reflection of rays on micro-surfaces with a high triangle density. However on micro-surfaces with a low triangle density, there was a much more pronounced difference with the smoothing techniques. A second conclusion was made which was that rougher surfaces have a more spread out distribution of rays than smoother surfaces.