Last week I posted a picture from Assignment 4 of my Computer Graphics class. For Assignment 5 (our final assignment that term), we had to propose a new feature to add to our raytracer and then implement it. I put together a half-baked proposal to simulate foggy environments, but my professor didn't like it. Instead, he suggested that I follow a more established route and implement a "photon map", which is a fairly quick way of adding global illumination effects (like caustics) to a scene.

Specifically, he said he would be happy if I could render a scene with a cylindrical mirror reflecting light the same way light is reflected at the bottom of a coffee cup. In the end, I submitted three images demonstrating caustics of reflection and refraction. This one was closest to what professor McCool specifically asked for, and it is my favourite of the three. I recall getting a good mark on the assignment, so I guess he liked the final product!

I have an ongoing project now to convert my raytracer into a path tracer, which would allow me to render scenes like this without any "special" code like photon maps. When I'm done I hope to re-render this image and last week's image using path tracing techniques instead, which will hopefully yield more "realistic" looking results.

Technical Details: This picture was rendered by the Windows version of my raytracer from Assignment 5 of CS488.