http://unclezeiv.kerid.org frequently lost in thought Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:28:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This week I have been busy completing the indirect lighting part of my project, but this turned out to be harder than expected. The problem was not particularly the algorithm itself, as I'm currently implementing a naive variant. As a reader pointed out, the state of the art in instant ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/08/more-indirect-lighting-stuff This week I've been busy with something rather unexciting: speeding up the light tree creation time. You might remember that, initially, I just implemented a O(n²) method in order to have a working prototype quickly; now I lowered that to O(nlogn) following advice from Miroslav Mikšík. It is now possible to ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/08/indirect-lighting-teaser Textured area lights turned out hugely popular, so now it's hard to live up to expectations I guess! This week's work was indeed far less exciting: I worked on supporting more material features, as so far only lambertian diffuse and phong specular where supported. Now, all diffuse shaders are supported. Every single ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/07/lightcuts-week-9 One of my favourite pictures from the original Lightcuts paper is an office scene lit exclusively by a tv screen. You can do that with textured area lights. In Blender you can already link a texture to a light, but the outcome is a sort of texture projection, which is useful ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/07/textured-area-lights-in-blender Apologies for not having updated my blog recently. There's quite a lot of stuff I have yet to blog about and I'll surely do that in the near future. This week is halfway through the Summer of Code and it's midterm evaluation time. Having been scolded for the lack of ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/07/gsoc-midterm-evaluation These days I've been working on adding support for oriented lights. It's mostly there, even though there are a couple of missing details and the current code is obviously slower than it could be. Still, like in my previous post, I can't resist posting another revisited preliminary test, now rendered with ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/06/lightcuts-oriented-lights I have just added support for directional lights on my branch. Using more than one "sun" light may sound weird, but that's actually how you transform environment maps in a collection of point lights, as each pixel ideally represents an infinitely distant illumination source. So I couldn't resist going back to ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/06/lightcuts-directional-lights A quick update from last week that I couldn't find the time to finalize. I post it now as it discusses a couple of interesting issues. Btw, week numbering refers to the official GSoC timeframe. --- UncleZeiv The scene shown below --- an ordinary Suzanne lit by 15000 colored lights --- ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/06/lightcuts-week-2 The Google Summer Of Code has officially started on Monday. I've been doing a fair amount of coding  since my last post and it is now possible to see something almost meaningful on my branch. I finally managed to have all pieces of the puzzle in place. My initial attempt to ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/05/playing-with-a-working-prototype Focus on lowering algorithmic complexity and don't perform other optimizations until their usefulness is demonstrated by thorough profiling: since I completely agree with this maxim, I feel obliged to explain why my latest lightcuts update seems to contradict it. First of all, let's recap: in order to select an optimal subset ... http://unclezeiv.kerid.org/2008/05/a-sprouting-tree