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The results are in. We got 382 billion photons rendered. Ill be doing the merge on the prism only image too.
The photon rendering program simulates the motion of photons in a room. This gives very realistic images, but takes ridiculous amounts of time.
See the section below for the history of the old Photon Soup Image.
I am doing the project again, and recently posted to http://slashdot.com and got swamped with responses.
Tracer 1.1 here puts the process at a low priority so it is more in the background.
Tracer 1.3 adds better speed, better merge. Other small changes.
Tracer 1.4 fixes the stereo problem.
Tracer 1.5 fixes a problem with focus of rays.
Download : tracer_1_5.zip (115 KB)
tracer_1_3.tar (1.2 MB) (sorry, no compression this time.)
readme.txt (FAQ)
I will be posting the results images as links a soon as we have some cool results.
Here they are, 382 Billion Photons... one left, one right, side left, side right, top left, top right.
Any one want to do stereo pairs of these?
Here is the prismonly images one left, one right, side left, side right, top left, top right.
These are dark. As I render more photons they will brighten, or you can put them in an image editor and brighten them. The overhead view shows very interesting beam splitting going on.
This image was generated in 1991 by simulating the motion of 29.8 Billion photons in a room. The room is 2 meters cubed with a 30 cm aperture in one wall. The opposite and adjacent walls are mirrors, so this is a 'tunnel of mirrors'. The depth of field is very shallow. In the foreground is a prism, resting on the floor. A beam of light emerges from the left wall, goes through the prism and makes a spectrum on the right wall. About 1 in 177 photons made it through the aperture.
The image took 100 Sun SparcStation1s 1 month to generate using background processing time. This represents 10 CPU years of processing time. If the lights are 25 watt bulbs this represents a few picoseconds of time. This was 'grid computing' way before its time.
I have an old 8mm Sun (QUIK-8 ?) cassette tape with the original 24 bit images of all 5 of these images and source code. If anyone has a reader and would like to extract the data please let me know.