Stanford Dragon and Gouraud Shading

Dan — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:57:38 +0000

I recently finished up school, and part of that was finishing up my ray tracing project. At the last minute, I implemented Gouraud shading which is a technique to try to smooth out a triangulated surface. What it really does is just linearly interpolate the normal vectors, where the normal of a vertex is calculated as a weighted average of the normals of the triangles using that vertex.

Long story short:

A render of the Stanford bunny with my raytracer without Gouraud shading.

A render of the Stanford bunny with smooth Gouraud shading.

Also, thanks to an improvement in my parallelization of the problem and a speedup in octtree traversal, I was able to render the Stanford dragon model (~1 million triangles):

The Stanford dragon model.

A Party to the World » gouraud shading

Stanford Dragon and Gouraud Shading