Andrew Soohwan Lee

Scene Description
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"Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!" — Big Bad Wolf

I was really interested in creating a "miniature world" hidden among a larger one, like in those fairytales of shoe-fixing gnomes. So, my final image is a whimsical homage to the story of "The Three Little Pigs". In the image, you find three brotherly pigs, facing off with a wolf. One pig has a top hat, another has a cap, and the other is a bit naked. Around them are the pigs' cottage house, a series of lampposts, and a forest full of lush bushes and heavy trees. If you look closely around the scene, you'll find old bottles, a broken-down toy car, and even a can of Coke. The tin container is meant to force the viewer to think again about scale (think Pikmin, if you're familiar). Hopefully, the image takes you to an otherworldly place!

Assets
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All downloaded models come from BlendSwap and Free3D. Also, most of these assets were modified in Blender to remove polygons, rearrange objects, reshape, etc. These are my downloaded assets:

- Pigs
- Pig hats
- House
- Ground and Trees (included normal map)
- Various trash (tin can, bottle, car, soda can)
- Background image (the plane in the distance)

These are the assets that were created by me in Blender:

- Wolf (texture found online of an existing wolf, but the model is mine)
- Lamps
- Bushes (using the Sapling Generator add-on + manual editing to create a single bush which was repeated/rotated/rescaled throughout scene).
- House foundation (texture also found online)


Technical Contributions
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Point light attenuation — Small change in the light code, but this allowed me to create a more night-like scene with the scattered lampposts.

OpenMP (on Mac) — Adding multithreading took a few days primarily because I had to change the entire build system to use a newer version of g++/gcc.

Depth of Field (unused) — I setup a custom depth of field rendering in the Ray Tracer to try to create a tilt-shift effect, but found that it just didn't look good enough (at least as good as photoshopping a tilt-shift in could). However, I did spend a reasonable amount of time tweaking this and rendering.

Photon Mapping (slightly used) — I setup basic photon gathering, but didn't have enough time to implement a final gather stage to remove the splotchiness. I swapped the kd-tree library from libkdtree++ to nanoflann to let me quickly find the nearest N photons (which is a built-in feature for nanoflann), and just set a large N-value to get kind-of-okay lighting. The effect is super subtle since I also heavily weighted the photon map's lighting, but it does add a little light.