News
August 13, 2019
I've created an Instagram-account for Dayflower and added links to it from the website. Only one image has been published so far, but more will come.
August 5, 2019
Today I've updated the website. It's now based on Bootstrap 4.1.
August 2, 2019
I've done a lot of improvements lately. Both added new, changed or removed existing features.
The following list shows the most notable improvements, in order, with the latest at top:
- ADD: It's now possible to change the exposure for all Tone Mappers in the GUI.
- ADD: All public API:s have been fully documented with Javadocs. Improvements may of course still be done over time.
- ADD: A new BlendTexture class has been added. Its constructors take two Textures as parameter arguments. When rendering, they are blended together. These two Textures cannot themselves be BlendTextures, however. This restriction might be fixed in a future version.
- CHANGE: The Material API has been changed. Previously the Material type was an enum. Now it is an interface and we have five implementations of it so far.
- CHANGE: The scene model and the renderer have been rewritten almost entirely, in order to optimize the memory requirement.
- CHANGE: The emission color of surfaces have been replaced with emission textures. This allows for partially emissive objects, or objects that vary in color over the surface.
- REMOVE: All scenes except House_Scene, Material_Showcase_Scene and Monkey_Scene have been removed temporarily. They need to be re-implemented because of the scene model change.
- CHANGE: The rendering speed has been optimized. Two of the arrays in RendererKernel have been changed to use private memory space, instead of local memory space. Doing the same change with the other arrays seems to undo this optimization.
- CHANGE: The Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) building algorithm has been optimized.
- CHANGE: It's now possible to configure the camera for a specific scene.
- ADD: Wireframe rendering has been added. It's possible to enable or disable this feature with a menu item checkbox.
- CHANGE: Image-based normal mapping does not use bilinear interpolation anymore.
- CHANGE: The exposure of the new Filmic Curve tone mapper has been changed to 1.0.
- CHANGE: Aparapi has been updated to a new version that supports arbitrary function implementation order.
- ADD: A menu item for saving the current image to disk has been added. It does not overwrite existing files.
- CHANGE: Normal mapping has been turned on by default.
- CHANGE: The default camera position, or eye, has been updated. It now looks at all spheres in the default scene.
- ADD: The maximum distance for the Ambient Occlusion renderer can now be changed by a slider.
- ADD: A new Filmic Curve tone mapper has been added. It is enabled by default. The previous Filmic Curve tone mapper still exists.
- ADD: The Ambient Occlusion renderer now supports a maximum distance. It is set to 200.0.
- CHANGE: The Ray Caster, Ray Marcher and Ray Tracer renderers have been updated with a new better Phong reflection model shader.
- CHANGE: The texture of the terrain for the Ray Marcher renderer has been updated. It uses a fractional Brownian motion (fBm) texture.
The list above is created from the ChangeLog.txt file.
May 26, 2019
Since the last time I updated the website, I've done the following:
- Improved the Ray Tracing algorithm
- Added support for simple clouds
- Optimized the Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) traversal algorithm
- Removed the Bloom effect, which was a work in progress
October 10, 2018
I've not updated this website in over a year. But the project isn't dead.
Since the last update I've done, among other things, the following:
- Added a rendering algorithm based on Ray Tracing
- Added a rendering algorithm based on Ambient Occlusion
- Added a new Texture type based on fractional Brownian motion (fBm)
- Improved the noise-based Normal Mapping with fractional Brownian motion (fBm)
- Improved the stability of the moving average algorithm used for the Monte Carlo-method simulation
August 24, 2017
A few days ago I published an early test implementation of Dayflower to GitHub. All the images on this website are based on this version.
You may also notice some minor changes to the website.
May 11, 2017
I've added a blog to the website today. Check it out at http://blog.dayflower.org.
March 23, 2017
Today I've added a gallery to the website. To view the images, navigate to Gallery.
March 19, 2017
The work for today has been to create the very first version of our new website. The old one didn't look that great and it had all its contents on one single page.
In order to create this new website, I had to create my own simplistic Object-Oriented Bootstrap framework for PHP.