Glimpses

Up to now the lights have only been represented by a single, infinitesimally smally point. This doesn't accurately model light in the real world which comes from an object have volume. Look at a light bulb, it takes up some amount of space. The side affect of have a point light is that all the shadows are really sharp, they have very defined edges. While the edges of shadows cast by lights with volume or area have soft edges. Here is a picture of the soft edges cast in real life:

Photon mapping is a way to do illumination in 3D graphics. This is my computer graphics project from college.

EveryBlog is meant to be a replacement for the default Drupal Blog module.

May 25, 2009: EveryBlog is pretty much tabled as the core functionality is easily implemented using views and taxonomy, this site for instance is using taxonomy for both tagging posts and placing them within specific "blogs" and then views are used to display matching posts. Hence the overhead of an entirely seperate module is not needed as it is fairly easily to do using existing solutions which are likely to be far more stable due to their larger development community.

Description

EveryBlog is the every man of blog modules. Its a replacement for Drupal's built-in Blog module that allows users to have multiple blogs. Each blog has its own name instead of being "So-in-so's Blog" and blogs can be grouped into categories. Categories are actually just a vocabulary that you have chosen to use for categorizing blogs (set via the settings page).

This has been an incredibly annoying project. Granted it stems from the fact that I didn't have all the resources I needed as far as the minute detials behind programming the ray tracer.

A bit out of order, but this post will deal with my work on using quads for area lights. Okay, here's the deal, how do you pick a random point from the interior of a quadrilateral and ensure that the distribution is as uniform as possible? Good question ehh? My math prof thinks so too. We discussed several methods. We are doing this because we need to emit photons from the surface of the light.

The following pictures of distributions are plotted with 2500 points.

Method A: Corners Method

Okay, really quick, photon mapping is where we cast photons from the light out into the scene we are drawing and store their interactions with the geometry in a photon map. Then we to a raytrace on the scene, but when we do our lighting calculations we use the information in the photon map as well as direct illumination. This gives us indirect illumination, and with the addition of a second photon map we can do good, cheap caustics. For more info check wikipedia.