It's June in San Diego and that means another graphics competition in the computer science department at UC San Diego. The competition marks the end of the Spring 2008 "CSE168 Rendering Algorithms" class with Henrik Wann Jensen.
The students in the class were asked to render a realistic object or scene of their own choosing, and the images were judged by an external panel of experts (the best student image would be rewarded with a trip to SIGGRAPH 2008). The winners and honorable mentions were selected based on the quality of their rendered images and the technical difficulty.
Bin Chen won the grand prize for his "Magical Lotus" graphic.
Bin created a realistic scene depicting two lotus flowers in a pond. He implemented a number of techniques including translucency using photon mapping, depth of field, ray marching, tone mapping, and bloom.
