I took a break from coding to play around with modeling. I updated my robot and built some furniture for him.

I took a camera outside and got some actual textures off real trees. Now I can use my real pictures of trees and leaves to make fake trees and leaves! That makes perfect sense! Anyhow, results are here, but I need to do some work on extracting alpha channels from flat photos. Even with a blue background and lots of post-processing in the GIMP, I still have bad textures. Oh well...

I guess you really aren't a raytracer until you've rendered something from the Stanford scanning repository.

I tried a little NPR stuff with some hatch textures and an special shader that tried to do multiple texture ovelapping based on shading values. The results were a little less than spectacular. I may revisit this one a little later.

Here is an implementation of the Peter Shirley sky model that is all the rage these days. I thought the colors were a little off, but I actually saw this gradient the other day while driving home from work. An orange sky. really...

This is my first attempt at a sky model. It is based on the CIE clear skies model. In the end, it just turns out to be a procedural gradient shader. I think they use it more for architectural lighting studies that making pictures.

Again, you must do the Sponza atrium. I don't have a fancy light transport algorithm implemented, this is a simple path tracer, but the light still got around to areas that were two bounces from the main skylight. This was lit using a simple direct sun model.

Pathtracer render lit entirely by direct skylight. Notice the color transfer from the floor onto the walls. Sweet.

I just liked the way the lighting turned out on this one.

I use an octree for acceleration because I am afraid of KD-trees. Seriously, they give me nightmares. Anyhow, I've been playing with the fiber plugin in blender, and it generates nice grass, but the polygon counts really take off (currently using a computer I bought in 2001, so this is important to me). So, I'm often drawn to the 'card' style of grass generation. This gets really fuzzy quickly, but you get nailed on all of the ray hits that get discarded because of the opacity channel.

Blinn shader with glossy reflections.

Playing around with the direct skylight model.

Chairs?