appleseed

Mentors: Student: Lovro Bosnar

<p>Texture maps are used for defining material properties for every point per object surface. Normal maps are textures that are efficient for introducing spatial variational detail on smooth geometry. Information from the normal map, in current shading point, can be used to define either shading normal of meso-surface or microsurface profile of microfacet bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). In this project, we will implement a method from Schüssler et al. "Microfacet-based normal mapping for robust Monte Carlo path tracing" which tackles with microfacet based normal mapping. The result of this method enables us to use arbitrary normal maps and BRDFs for defining the microfacet BRDF for the whole surface. Important properties of the introduced microfacet BRDF are energy conservation, symmetry and discrete distribution of microsurface normals which preserves high-frequency detail.</p>

Mentors: Student: Tiago Loureiro Chaves

<p>This project aims to equip the post-processing pipeline with a good amount of new artistic effects, to allow users to tweak the overall look and feel of their scenes without having to leave appleseed.</p> <p>The four main effects which will be added are <strong>Bloom</strong>, <strong>Tonemapping</strong>, <strong>Chromatic Aberration</strong> and <strong>Vignetting</strong>, which do not take place during rendering, but rather, are composited on top of the resulting image.</p> <p>Post-processing applies full image filters and transformations to the rendered scenes, which can drastically improve their visual quality with little computation time. Currently, this is only possible with final renders in appleseed, however, bringing this feature to paused interactive renders is another goal of this project, as this is a more artist friendly approach to testing different customizable values of effects.</p>

Mentors: Student: João Marcos Mororó Costa

<p>This project will improve the current Appleseed's implementation of physical sun and sky models. Fixing the current blue tint present on Appleseed implementation and adding several new features. Such as, a solar disk, ability to configure the Sun with a geographic location, a date and a time and allow users to change atmosphere parameters. Those new features will make the sky models more flexible for artists and will provide a more accurate representation of the appearance and illumination from the day sky. The new features will also make it possible to render other planets skies, from a physically plausible mars sky to an alien sky with multiple suns and a stunning sky's color.</p>