OllieBrown

I've been busy for a few days with a rather boring user study and the results of it were less than great ... so I needed a pick-me-up. For me, this means some creative work. Hence, I decided to spend a little time modeling a new world to test my lighter2 changes. Something considerably more complex than the cornell box and construction in wood and that would logically include every type of light (point, directional and spot). It's fun because it's art (in a way ... right) and for me I learn how to use blender better and can refine my workflow for getting things into CrystalSpace's XML world format.

Anyways, Here's what I've created:

The Sponza Atrium with Stanford models scattered around the main floor (Lucy the angel statue is front and center). No static-lighting is present yet so shadows are missing.

It's a combination of a bunch of different cannonical models from the graphics community (from Stanford specifically ... yes the bunny is in there) all placed in the Sponza Atrium model that's been appearing in global illumination papers for the past several years now. The atrium is texture mapped (and has bump maps somewhere that I have yet to track down). The Stanford meshes are incredibly dense (100K faces each AFTER I decimated them, they had millions in their original form ... some 10s of millions). So, this is an intense little scene to render and particularly tough to run through lighter2. It's a more realistic example and hopefully will test just how robust the system is. Consequently it takes a VERY long time to light. Most of the time is spent laying out the lightmaps (not raytracing or photon mapping) but be prepared to wait a while if you want to re-calc the maps and put it on a machine that you can let run for potentially a few days. I'll post some more images as lighter2 finishes running.

Blender model: I setup the world in blender and here is the file for that. It took a lot to get all of this into blender. Here's a breakdown of what I did -

• I started with the 3ds model available here
• Loaded the 3ds model into wings3d and exported to obj (to preserve textures)
• Loaded obj into blender using standard obj importer
• Grabbed the different Stanford ply models from here (except lucy.ply which came from here ... the one at stanford site is too big to fit in memory (even 4G of it plus a huge swap file)).
• Loaded each ply model into meshlab and decimated it to 100K faces (except bunny which was already small enough)
• Exported each model to obj in meshlab and imported into blender sponza model
• After positioning meshes and adding the pedestal for each I selected each mesh and set the faces to be smooth which will auto-compute normals (the original meshes were point scans and as such do not have normals in the ply files).
• Added spot lights by hand and tweaked fill lighting and camera positions (there are two different places to start in this world).

The model is still missing several textures and when you export it there will be several errors that need to be fixed by hand. These are all present in the original 3ds file and were just easier to fix by editing the world file by hand.

SponzaBlender.zip (15.2 MB, hosted externally)

Material fixes for world file: Here's the extra textures and a snippit of XML that can be pasted into the world file over it's 'textures' and 'materials' section to fix all the errors created by Blender2Crystal. Note that bump maps are still missing. I can't seem to find these on the net anywhere.

SponzaMaterialFix.zip (499 KB, hosted externally)

CrystalSpace world: Here's the exported world with the material and texture fixes already applied.

SponzaCSWorld.zip (16.4 MB, hosted externally)

Static lit CS world: Here's the same world with lightmaps included so you don't have to wait for it to finish raytracing. This is just direct raytracing for now. A photon mapped version is forthcoming.

[Still rendering, will post soon]