VOLUNTEER ANNUAL RENDERING COOK-OFF 2002 (VARCO’02)

In Fall 2002, I taught CS594 Computer Graphics for a second time at Department of Computer Science, University of Tennessee (Knoxville). The students in my class created very interesting graphics renderings with OpenGL. Compared with my 2001 class, I would definitely rank the results produced by my 2002 class higher, both in terms of technical capabilities and artistic merits. As a convention, they all competed in VARCO 2002 (Volunteer Annual Rendering Cook-Off). As a side note for those of you who never had anything to do with Tennessee, “Volunteer” means something different from what you have in mind. Just like “Buckeyes”, “Sooners”, “Gators”, etc., here in Tennessee, we cheer “Go Volunteers” in our stadium.

The winner was Yuanlei Zhang. Due to the high quality of the results submitted to VARCO’02, all top three ranked competitors were awarded a grand prize of a five-star rated graphics book of their choice, while during 2001, only the top winner was awarded a grand prize. The two runners-up were Dustin Parr and Svetlana Mironova. As a record and to also show off, I have collected a few cool images, according to my personal taste, on this page. Enjoy! To see full size images, please click on each individual image on this page. If you are an employer looking for student interns or permanent employees, please contact me or just go grab the student yourself. If you are a student thinking of taking a graphics course, please contact me.

As usual, we started with simple things, such as geometry, transformations and lighting etc. Since there were quite a lot more complicated techniques introduced, let’s skip those simplistic stuff and go right into fun features.

Quite early during the semester, Yuanlei Zhang created a solar system with the geometry of one sphere, transformed mapped with texture maps to form all the respective planets. The radius of each planet supposedly should show the proportional size. He even added a little moon around the earth.

Procedural marble texture. (created by Yuanlei Zhang) In Gong-Fu, Budda often lifts things to work out. They should have shown this in Couching Tiger.

After multi-pass rendering was covered, lots of interesting effects were tried, such as mirror, combined textures for separate color/shading channels, bumps and shadows.

Bump maps (left and middle, by Yuanlei Zhang) and shadow map (right, by Jeff Burton)

Due to probably my good teaching J, most OpenGL renderers written by my students this year can handle moderately complicated scenes.

A corner scene. (created by Thomas Benson)

Semi-transparent mirror, with procedural textured floor, marble textured Budda, and a ball mapped with both a color texture and a texture of specular high-lights. (created by Lana Mironova)

Semi-transparent and clear mirror scenes with bump mapped floors and walls (created by Jeff Burton)

When creating shadows using shadow map, very often one would see aliased shadow boundaries, due to some inherent limitations in the algorithm itself. Matt Aldridge very creatively used projective shadows in his VARCO competition image to produce alias-free shadows. Nice thinking!

Projective shadow (by Matt Aldridge)

Well, if one is extremely careful, still shadow mapping can produce quite smooth shadow boundaries, as shown by Yuanlei.

Very nice shadows cast on a marble plate. (created by Yuanlei Zhang)

The images submitted by Howell Evang to VARCO’02, in my eyes, were the most artistic. He creatively applied environmental maps to object surfaces. Combining color and alpha from environment map, as well as bumps, he got the following images. I was blown away by how seemingly casual use of environment map can surprise my eyes. The fact that I used two of these images as the title images of this page tells how much I like Howell’s work.

Well, there were also gamers in my class. Dustin Parr spent lots of his precious time, besides earning a scholarship, on getting cool textures and models in the scene below, rendered with fog, showing a battlefield. If you are a keen gamer, you must be able to tell which game these are from.

Enemy in the mist (left) and Queen mate (right), by Dustin Parr.

Well, finally, here are images from the winning series, by Yuanlei Zhang. This is a scene with almost every technique covered during the semester, including color textures, bump map, shadow mapping, mirror, alpha blended semi-transparency, per-fragment tested complete transparency, procedural textures, as well as scene graph and animation. The globe floating in space is opaque on land and totally transparent otherwise. The shadow cast from that globe looks quite intriguing. As we hackers all know, being able to put all these tricks in the same bag while everything works is a big deal. Excellent job! As noted by our TA, Farial, the texture on the table is Winnie the Pooh, and his classmates!! So, all girls in the class voted for Winnie, I think J.

By Yuanlei Zhang (VARCO’02 winner)

After all presentations, we anonymously voted for the best renderings. As soon as we had our winners, the prizes were awarded. Since it was Lana’s birthday, we sang “Happy birthday, Dear Lana “, to end a happy story!

Personally, I am very proud seeing these wonderful results. Great job, crew! Thank you!