Soft Shadow Mip-Maps

Yang Shen, M.S. Thesis, University of Utah, 2016
A real-time soft shadow technique approximating physical soft shadows. It is based on the scheme of Percentage-Closer Soft Shadow (PCSS) with a more accurate blocker-depth estimation, and an efficient computation model utilizing shadow mip-maps. The algorithm achieved a better balance in soft shadow quality and performance compared with PCSS, Variance Soft Shadow Mapping, and Ray-traced soft shadows.

Ray-Tracing Renderer in C++ (2012)

[project page]

I built this renderer for the Ray Tracing class. Major implementations include:

  • Blinn shading; shadow, reflection and refraction, refraction objects use Schlick's approximation to compute Fresnel terms

  • bounding box for plane triangle and sphere

  • building BVH for all triangle mesh

  • apply texture objects using procedural checker-board texture or PPM image

  • compute texture coordinate derivatives using ray differentials

  • adaptive anti-aliasing with multiple samples per pixel and pixel sampling using Halton Sequence;

  • depth of field and motion blur

  • path tracing

  • photon mapping

Interactive Refraction in GLSL (2012)

[project page]

Implemented a two-face image-based refraction method in GLSL. The algorithm is referenced from Chris Wyman's 2005 SIGGRAPH paper entitled "An Approximate Image-Space Approach for Interactive Refraction".