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.)"
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.)" Within 2 months: "The paper got a prize and I would like to thank everyone who participated PS: Never post pictures of photo's on slashdot, my webserver is nothing but photons now"
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".
Firstly, I'm kind of irritated that the usual slashdot troll crowd expends so much hatred and ignorance on a truly creative project. The technique might not be using OpenGL, DirectX or ATi or NVidia's newest cards, but that is no reason to trash talk a technique that, in a few years time, might revolutionise CGI work in movies.
And in movie production is where this technique will most probably eventually find use. Movie studios have the budget and the server farm equipment to make good use of a time and resource expensive technique such as this.
And they certainly would want to. The images have almost exactly the same quality as grainy 1950's kodacolor or poor images from my 1970's vintage Kodak instamatic. While adding grain to a movie is no problem, most rendering techniques used today produce surfaces that are simply too clean and glass effects that are too clear, and this immediately gets picked up by the human eye, which is very good at subliminally noticing differences in image quality. Tracing the paths of photons and their interaction through and with materials produces images that mimic reality in an excellent way, IMO.
I'm pretty sure that a large cluster, such as the one using Apple's G5s at Virginia tech, running optimised C or C++ code would be able to produce usable footage for movies. And what's more, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later, there will be tools to make this technique more accessable.
It takes more time to download the images from a slashdotted site then actually render them!
\m/
Have a link to a BitTorrent tracker with the images.
You will want 'photon_soup'
Jack