Press here for a general introduction to these rendering competitions.
Chase's winning entry from the Winter of '93 features dimpled oranges
and smoke rising from a coffee cup. Both of these objects, as well
as the distorted globe in the background, were rendered using Chase's
volume raytracer. The orange's skin and the distorted globe are
isosurfaces of a volume density function, while the smoke is directly
rendered from another density function.
Jim's golf ball was not only texture mapped with a genuine Spalding
golf ball label; it was also bump-mapped with several hundred dimples,
placed at the centers of triangles generated by a regular tessellation
of the sphere.
Bruce and Mike's scene exhibits almost all of the major functionality
required in the course project. Note that while the top mirror is
shiny, the lower one is diffuse. Also, the shadow cast by the blue
cube is diffuse. Both of these are created by distribution
ray-tracing. Other features include refraction and texture mapping.
John and Steve's image was designed to match a real-life scene, which
they showed alongside their computer-generated image. Although
difficult to see at this resolution, the mug's surface has several
scratches and other markings, as did the real object.
Patrick's elegant marble texture won him an honorable mention in the
render-off. His renderer utilized a very efficient space-subdivision
method coupled with a progressive refinement technique which allowed
the user to watch the image slowly appear as it was calculated.