Slashdot Mirror
Photon Soup Update
rkeene517 writes "Two and a half months ago I posted an article asking for spare computer cycles. I was swamped by emails and volunteers. After the first weeks most dropped out. The die-hards kept running the program and we simulated 45.3 billion photons. The pictures are here. Thanks to all that helped out. I will be submitting the images to SIGGRAPH 2005 and a paper. (P.S. Never post your email address on slashdot. I got 900 emails! ouch.)"
Since freecache only caches files >5MB, this isn't going to help anything (freecache is just going to pass those requests through to the original server)...
Donate free food here
read the fucking blurb?
** I will be submitting the images to SIGGRAPH 2005 and a paper.**
the images make a nice addition to the paper.. to show that the technique actually works.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Such a story is useless without the images. So here's a temporary mirror for the resulting images of the project:
Photon Rendering Project: image mirror
The mirror won't be up forever.
Photons mapping is currently used on a small scale in some rendering engines to more accurately simulate light bounces. Its particularly useful at calculating caustics (light getting focused through a transparent medium) which can't be done by the less intensive radiosity systems. This experiment, however, seems to try to render using photon mapping exclusively. Nice idea, though not really practical at the present state of computing, given the graininess of the images and the amount of processing time. The Brazil rendering system (http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.php3?p rinter=1&page=brazil) for example, uses photon mapping on a much small scale (usually between 1-10M photons) in combination with raytracing to provide clear, realistic imagery (though not as technically perfect as this example)
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I would recommend that the submitter take down the zips and images and reoptimize them as smaller size JPGs. A 650k file is just crazy for the actual image - which is only 512 pixels wide and blurry (due to depth of field effects). Just go into Photoshop, hit "Save for web", and you can resize and change the JPG settings to your hearts content. I got one of the files down to 12k and it looks fine. These are not highly detailed images to start with. .PNG may be the format of choice for geeks worldwide, but I've always thought it was worthless.
Have a link to a BitTorrent tracker with the images.
You will want 'photon_soup'
Jack