Project 10 - Soft Shadows & Glossy Surfaces

Multi-sampling provides more useful features for our ray tracers: softer shadows from area lights and estimation of rougher surfaces with glossiness added to our reflections and refractions. For generating soft shadows, I used a combination of deterministic ray generation followed by quasi-random sampling using the Halton sequence. I did this so that I sampled the outer edges of the light disk (sphere) before doing the random sampling. This gives us softer penumbras, at the cost of more initial shadow samples.

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Glossy Spheres

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Softer Shadows

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Many Colors

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Buggy Images

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Details

Specs

Glossy Spheres:

render time	minimum samples	maximum samples	color variance
3 min 25.311 s	8	32	0.0001
7 min 03.998 s	16	64	0.0001

Many Colors:

to come…

render time	minimum samples	maximum samples	color variance	shadow samples
01 min 34.564 s	4	8	0.01	4 / 8
11 min 17.756 s	8	32	0.001	8 / 32
61 min 11.301 s	16	128	0.0001	8 / 32

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