Final Project
This assignment was modeled after the
Final Project
of Stanford's Image Synthesis class.
Academic Misconduct
- Late Submission:
- There is no option to be late for the final project.
- Deadlines:
- Thu, December 07 (23:59) - project proposal (submit a pdf through moodle)
Thu, January 25 (23:59) - final project report (submit a pdf through moodle)
Tue, January 30 (23:59) - presentations (submit a pdf through moodle as well as the project source code separately)
Description
For your final project we ask you to produce a realistic image of a
real object or scene. The scene or object should be challenging enough
to require you to design and implement an advanced rendering
algorithm. The final project is your chance to investigate an area
that interests you in more depth, and to showcase your creativity. To
see what your peers at Stanford did, check out
these descriptions.
Here are some things to think about following when choosing a project:
- What are your goals? Try and phrase this as specific questions
that you would like to know the answers to, e.g. How do I model
reflection from surfaces with fine geometric structure, such as
fur?
- What unique imagery would convincingly demonstrate that you have
accomplished your goals? Try and keep this in mind throughout
your project, since in computer graphics our work is often
judged by the images we make.
- What has already been done in this area? You probably won't have
time to completely investigate this, but you should definitely
spend some time reading research papers. We can help you with
finding appropriate references. When you read a paper, look for
what has not been done as well as what is already understood;
think about new things that you could try.
- Depending on the scope of your goals, you may want to work in a
group. We encourage two person groups; larger groups will only
be allowed to take on very, very challenging projects. Does your
project split naturally into several pieces? Look for projects
where each person's work is separable, and yet everyone
contributes toward a shared goal that could not be accomplished
individually.
Some Project Ideas
Try to find a project idea that you're passionate about; you'll be spending a lot of time working on it, so it's good to be excited about it!
You may find inspiration from some of the assigned reading as well as from some of the more complex exercises in Physically Based Rendering. Also see the “Further Reading” section at the end of chapters that are about topics that may interest you for your final project. In addition, skimming through
a list of recent graphics research papers might be useful (particularly papers published at SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering).
Here are some ideas that you may find interesting or may spark ideas about other projects:
Rendering Hair or Fur
- Efficiently computing ray intersections with hair (modeled as, for example, bicubic curves with a radius) remains a not-well-solved problem; can you come up with an efficient technique for this?
- Implement Marschner et al's hair scattering algorithm and render images, perhapes comparing to Kajiya and Kay's approach.
Shading Languages
BRDFs and Reflection Models
Implement an approach like Westin et al's Predicting reflectance functions from complex surfaces for generating tabularized BRDF models by simulating light transport in microgeometry.
Subsurface Scattering
pbrt implements a basic version of the Jensen and Buhler 2002 subsurface scattering approach, but a number of improvements have been developed since then, including d'Eon and Irving's approach, Donner et al's empirical BSSRDF model, and Donner and Jensen's skin model.
Volumetric Light Transport
Implement Kulla and Fajardo's Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media approach for efficient importance sampling in participating media.
Innovative Cameras
Implement a light field camera in pbrt (Light Field Photography with a Hand-held Plenoptic Camera, by Ng et al.).
Project Proposal, due Dec 07 (Thu) 23:59
As a first step you should write a one page project proposal and
email me your webpage. The proposal should contain a picture of a real object
or scene that you intend to reproduce. We suggest that you first pick
something that you would like to simulate, and then investigate what
techniques need to be used. A real object that you can carry around
with you is best, but a good photograph or painting is almost as
good. In addition to having illustrative pictures, your proposal
should state the goal of your project, motivate why it is interesting,
identify the key technical challenges you will face, and outline
briefly your approach. If you are implementing an algorithm described
in a particular paper, provide the reference to the paper. Please list
all group member's names clearly at the top of the page, and if you
plan on collaborating with others, briefly describe how each person's
piece relates to the others.
The purpose of the proposal is to get everyone organized early, and
it will give us the opportunity to provide feedback as to whether we
think your idea is reasonable, and to offer some technical guidance,
e.g. papers you might be interested in reading.
Resources
You may find some of the 3D file format converters and mesh processing tools listed at the
pbrt website useful if you need to convert scenes from external modeling systems to pbrt's input format.
Final Writeup, due Jan 25 (Thu) 23:59
The writeup should be roughly 3-4 pages, and contain the following:
-
A 2-3 page summary of the algorithms/techniques used to produce
your images (use references to academic papers for extra
detail). Please highlight how your implementation differed (was
a subset of, augmented) the technique described in your
references.
-
A description of problems encountered (techniques that did not
work?) and how they were overcome.
-
A clear description of what work each team member performed.
-
A results/conclusions section containing your final images,
additional images you don't have a chance to show on the day of the presentations
that might be especially cool or good illustrations of your
technique.
-
All images should be included in your final report (as a pdf file). Feel free to have an appendix which shows images large and clear. However, we will grade the quality of your writeup as well.
Please take the time to create a high quality writeup for your
project (think about it as writing a tech report you'd like to keep
permanently on the web). We will be archiving the final project pages
and they will be viewed for years to come.
Example final writeups from Stanford students:
Presentations, due Jan 30 (Tue) 23:59
On the day of the presentations, each group will be given 15 minutes to demonstrate their
system to the class and rendering competition judges and show some
images that they produced. You can show off your images on any machine
you see fit. Remember to bring the object/images that you are modeling
and reproducing. The goals and technology that you developed should be
obvious from the image itself. After all, this is graphics. Keep in
mind that you absolutely need to have your rendering done by this
date. Late days are not allowed on the final
project.
As there is a tendency for these presentations to go long, here's
some guidelines on how to prepare for the final presentation so
everyone remains entertained and the judges get an adequate impression
of your work.
-
1 minute -- Motivation: describe the image you were trying to
create, and why the image you are trying to create is both cool
and technically challenging.
-
9 minutes -- Technical: give a brief description of the
algorithms/techniques you implemented in your project. You can
assume that the audience probably has heard of the techniques
before, and thus want to brief, precise summary of how they were
incorporated into your project (how you used to technique to
meet your needs). It is often helpful if you can display images
contrived to demonstrate that your algorithms indeed work as
claimed (test shots, etc). This is also a good time to let the
audience know if a technique was tried, and didn't work (again,
test images work great here)
-
1 minute -- Show off your final image that demonstrates your achievements the best.
-
4 minutes -- Allow 4 minutes for questions
It is useful (but not required) to get a web page or Powerpoint
presentation prepared (look for
alternatives to powerpoint )
to keep your presentation organized.
Grading
Grading criteria:
- 7% - project proposal (Dec 07, 23:59)
- 7% - final report (Jan 25, 23:59)
- 10% - presentation (Jan 30, 23:59)
- 20% - implementation and results
- did you get something working?
- did you indicate the problems involved?
- how did you deal with the problems?
- how well can you answer my questions?
- etc.
We will consider strongly the novelty of
the idea (if it's never been done before, you get lots of credit),
your technical skill in implementing the idea, and the quality of the
pictures you produce. Tons of coding does not make a project
good. When you are finished with your project you should post the
source for your system and any test scenes and images that you have
created. As stated above, you are permitted to work in small groups,
but each person will be graded individually. A good group project is a
system consisting of a collection of well defined subsystems. Each
subsystem should be the responsibility of one person and be clearly
identified as their project. A good criteria for whether you should
work in a group is whether the system as a whole is greater than the
sum of its parts!
The final project can be a lot of fun. Good luck!