CPSC 3710 Project

Garrett Speager

Feb 11, 2008

More Images

What I Chose To Do

The hardest part to me was figuring out what I wanted to make, it took a long time to decide on what I was going to model. None of the landmarks I found appealed to me, and I kind of wanted to make an indoor scene because I could play with multiple light sources. After a lot of thinking and searching, I found 2 chess pieces in one of the MORay example scenes, and I figured that would be fun to do. So I decided on doing a Chess game with a board as my main focus of the project but, I also threw in a room, because I didn't want the scene just floating out in space.

What I Used

Since I've never made a Ray tracing project before, I looked at the PovRay from the beginning. I did a few tutorials but the idea of scripting the entire project was a little daunting. So I downloaded Blender, looked at the interface and started the tutorial. But eventually got confused and decided I was going to do it in POVRay. I figured if I was going to attempt POVRay, I better at least see what MORay was. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would try using POVRay without the MORay interface, it made everything so much easier.

Difficulties

Well first I started out by going through the one tutorial I could find. Now that I'm done it turns out there's more at that site, but that one tutorial was all I needed to get familiarized with the interface. There were 2 main difficulties I ran into working with MORay:

1) Managing the Texture interface, originally I just wasn't clear on how to add different textures to the MORay Material interface, But once I figured it out it was super easy from there.

2) Making meshes smooth and round, when I was modelling I would take the basic shapes and converth them to a mesh, and manipulate the points to get a shape like I wanted. But I discovered that all I needed to do Was Edit the mesh and increase the Subdivision Surface - Subdivision Level.

The actual final difficulty that I faced was waiting for MORay to render the scene. It took 5 minutes on average(on my home computer) for POVRay to parse the script and another 5 to 10 minutes to render the scene without Anti-Aliasing enabled. For the main Image 3x3 AA was enabled and it took 1 hour and 3 min to render. If there were more glass pieces in the scene then it would take much longer to render. Even though the glass was much prettier I still rendered from the direction of the black metal pieces more often to save time.

Final Thoughts

Although I've never done a project like this before, I enjoyed it a lot and could see myself sinking even more time into a project like this.

As for sources. I was inspired by one of scenes included in MORay, but my scene was entirely my own work. I did an image search with Google just to make sure I was making the pieces correctly. Also all the textures I used were from the POVRay texture library.

You can see more images here.