Realistic rendering. (portfolio).

For their final course project, students in the Image Synthesis Techniques class at Stanford University put their rendering skills to the test by creating images that accurately depicted physical phenomena. The projects not only accounted for a significant portion of the students' final grades, but were also judged by an industry panel as part of the class's annual rendering competition. This year's grand prize winners, Steve Bennett and Arthur Amezcua, won a trip to Siggraph 2001. Judging the contest were Steve Marschner from the Stanford Graphics Lab, Brian Smits from Pixar, and Dan Wexler from PDI.

Working mostly in teams, 25 of Pat Hanrahan's students selected and created their projects for the graduate-level course in approximately three weeks. To produce their works, the students used the LRT rendering system, developed over the past two years by teaching assistant Greg Humphreys and Ph.D. candidate Matt Pharr, now ...