Senior Project Update 1

This week, we focused on researching and further developing our project. Our initial design document was due on Friday, and in preparation for completing our first draft, we read a series of papers that Dr. Badler had suggested to us, including “Global Illumination Using Photon Maps” by Henrik Wann Jensen, “Extending the Photon Mapping Method for Realistic Rendering of Hot Gaseous Fluids” by Byungkwon Kang, Insung Ihm, Chandrajit Bajaj, and “Video Textures” by Schodl et al. We also emailed Alan Chalmers to request a copy of his paper "Authentic Illumination of Archaelogical Site Reconstructions" and emailed Alla Safanova for suggestions on papers regarding flame and smoke simulation.

On Thursday, we met with Cory Boatright, to go over our design document for the project. After he answered questions we had over various aspects of our document and the project in general, we talked about goals for the upcoming weeks, and shared what we each knew about the project's current status.

The next day, we received feedback on our design document from Joe Kider during a DMD Senior Project meeting, as well as general advice on how to navigate through our project successfully. Based on the feedback, we made minor changes to our initial design document, and submitted it online.

For next week, we intend to begin exploring and learning Radiance. We also plan to read or reread relevant papers to get a better grasp on methods and algorithms; new papers include "High Fidelity Lighting of Knossos", "High Fidelity Reconstruction of the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Kalabsha", and "Realistic Visualisation of the Pompeii Frescoes" from Alan Chalmers.

We plan to meet with Dr. Badler and other group members later this week to discuss developments on the project, define each team member's responsibilities, and to chart a course for the project over the semester. We were informed that we'd also be meeting with Professor Holod this week; if the meeting is early enough in the week, we will begin to work on glass and metal textures.