Senior Project Update 2

Last Tuesday, we met with Professor Holod, Dr. Badler, Cory, and one of Professor Holod's grad students to learn more about the art history aspect of our project. From Professor Holod we found out more about the Mosque of Cordoba, a 7th century mosque in Spain. A 3D representation of the mosque will be lit in a historically accurate fashion during the lamp simulation component of our project. Professor Holod told us more about the glass lamps used inside the mosque, the materials used to make the lamps, and how they were made. We were also given some information on what Professor Holod was looking for in terms of lighting, and are planning to meet at the museum this Thursday to examine glass lamp samples.

We also met with Dr. Badler, Cory, and Joe on Thursday to go over project details in greater depth. We discussed Radiance, as well as an overview of a project schedule for the semester which will be listed below at the end of this entry.

Alan Chalmers kindly replied to our email and sent us three papers: "Realistic Visualisation of the Pompeii Frescoes", "High Fidelity Reconstruction of the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Kalabsha", and "High Fidelity Lighting of Knossos." At the moment, our priority is learning Radiance and being able to render out images with the photon mapper, but we will be sure to use the information in these papers later on in the semester.

We had somewhat mixed success with Radiance last week. Becky was able to download and install the latest version of Radiance (3.9), and by following a tutorial, rendered out a red ball. Since the latest version of Radiance is Unix software, I worked on installing Linux. Unfortunately, I ran into some technical problems--mainly, I found out that my laptop's wireless hardware isn't supported by Ubuntu's drivers, and I wasn't able to download Radiance. However, we discussed at the meeting on Thursday that we should be leaning towards the Windows version of Radiance anyway, so this is no longer a problem. That said, I now have wireless working on Linux.

This week, we will continue working in Radiance, conducting benchmarking tests between the Unix and Windows version and looking into what illuminants Radiances uses, and which ones are relevant to our project. We will also start looking at Brian Summa's photon mapping code, as well as looking up rendering Maya files in Radiance. During our trip to the museum, we will be making observations so that we can begin modeling and texturing.
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Project Schedule

At the moment, Becky and I have decided to work on things together. We're still at the stage that requires both of us to be familiar with aspects of the project---Radiance, the photon mapper, etc. For later parts of the project, we are planning to divide the work between individual tasks and peer programming.

By mid-February:
- Spectrometer is obtained; Cory will be taking measurements (liquids too)
[For photon map related tasks, Cory and Kaikai Wang will be helping us as well]
- We should have rendering that works with the spectral characteristics that we want (may need to modify the photon mapper to do this; will have to research wavelength dependent rendering)
- Tested out Brian's photon mapper (with modified environment, increased polygons); benchmark tests will be conducted to compare to Radiance

By March 1st:
- Should be able to render out an environment

Mid March:
- Render with Alan Chalmers' spectra, different material properties, and increased complexity

April:
- Implement flickering motion graph using methods from "Video Textures" paper
          --> Start with random flickering map, and check to see whether Radiance can handle this
          --> Start with one flame, and move onto several flames
- Render out movies and do write-ups