Saturday, December 1, 2012

Thesis utilities

For my thesis, I created some tools to help me along the way. I made the source code to these tools publicly available at github. I can only encourage other people to use and improve these tools.

Random scene generator

The first tool is a random scene generator.  This Java program allows you to create a cornell box in which user-specified model is inserted a random locations.The following image shows the result of a scene with 343 icosahedrons. To create the scene, it is divided into equal sized voxels and in each voxel an icosahedron is placed. This avoid cluming of the geometry into one location.

The code is available at: https://github.com/NielsBillen/PBRTRandomSceneGenerator

Figure 1: Random cornell box with 343 icosahedrons

Batch rendering tool

The following tool allows you to render a batch of scenes. The program uses a stripped down scene file as input, inserts your specific parameters into the scene file (e.g. Surfaceintegrator "directlighting" "string strategy" ["one"]) and executes it. 

It is also possible to distribute jobs over multiple pc's using SSH.