Today I met with Matt Bett to talk about my research question - specifically the scope - and he confirmed what I had already suspected. My research question is too broad. Matt highighted some more specific areas that I might like to focus on, such as soft shadowing and ambient occlusion. I was especially interested in the topic of ambient occlusion in real time.
In short, ambient occlusion is used to generate the soft shadows that appear in creases or corners where light cannot reach so easily. It is seperate from the shadows actually cast by light sources, so the type and position of any light sources in the scene are not needed in the calculations. Adding ambient occlusion to a scene gives objects a more realistic, 3 dimensional appearance than just cast shadows and lighting on their own would.
An example of dynamic ambient occlusion -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eefsv8tQmAg
Matt told me that this was a pretty current topic in graphics rendering right now, which makes me think that it would be a good topic for my project. There's also a good amount of research material available from what I can see.
I plan to redo Worksheet #2 before the weekend and formulate a new research question based around dynamic ambient occlusion for real time applications.
No comments:
Post a Comment