Distributed Raytracing

For the final project, I did multiple kinds of distributed raytracing. I didn't really have a firm idea of what nifty scene I wanted to have it do at the end, so I just played around with it, hopefully making some interesting scenes along the way.

1:Anti-aliasing.

After receiving the hint in-class, I followed the directions to implement antialiasing--just pass jittered x/y coordinates to the CalcPixel function. A 3x3 grid was adequate for my uncultured standards. The scene is the test one I made from the "getting to know the raytracer" assignment.

2:Soft Shadows.

Attempt 1:Randomize a cube around each light source
This one generated a great deal of noise around the shadow edges. The noise went down as I upped the shadow feelers, of course, but even at 100 it's still noticeable. This is the first picture on the left. Note the graininess on the side.

Attempt 2:Uniformly randomize a sphere around each light source
This one had similar problems as above.

Attempt 3:Randomize in a circle in the plane perpendicular to the direction vector.
While I'm uncertain about my implementation, it created noise even when not around the shadow's edges. Which was weird.

In the end I was satisfied with throwing in antialiasing. 3x3 jittered anti-aliasing with 10 shadow feelers per ray for this second image on the left. The graininess is still there, but a gray shadow on a gray material is hard to pick out. =)

3.Motion Blur

"whoosh". I got tired of the Tower of Hanoi thing, so I started playing with other objects. Such as wooden spheres at high velocites. I added a SetCurrentTime function to the RayTraceData that just runs a rigid transform. Then as mentioned in class--jittered in time, using a square root function. I used 200 rays per pixel to get a nice blurry feel.
Here's a second picture, from a better angle.

4.Depth of Field

Here the eye position is jittered. I used a 5x5 pattern on more wooden spheres.

5.Artistic Attempts

The first I've tentatively(pretentiously?) titled "The March of Time". A sundial and hourglass sit at the front, blurry and replaced by the analog clock on the mirror wall. Four and a half hours, and the clock is whited out by a light source. Ah well.
What I started rendering when I woke up today(instead of studying!). Motion blur on the Newton marble thing.