Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin (1987) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin (1987) [pdf]

cs.northwestern.edu

47 pointsgcv15 comments

This article is by Paul Heckbert, who is also known for writing a raytracer that fit on the back of his business card. http://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/

Since there seems to be some confusion in the comments, I'll point out that the Jell-O paper is 100% not serious. It's a satire of excessively-mathematical computer graphics papers. (Source: I shared an office with Paul.)

Famous 1984 distributed ray tracing image [1] remains one of my all-time favorite CG images. (Scroll to last page.)

1: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~cs6965/papers/p137-cook.pdf

That is absolutely mind-boggling for 1984.

I especially love the reflections. It's not even noticeable unless you look carefully, but you can see reflections of cluttered windows, a light-up sign, and a human silhouette. I'd love to rotate the camera and see what their actual out-of-frame scene looks like.

Yea, it's crazy. My hunch is that they used reflection mapping for those details like the windows. It's hard to believe this was done in '84 when you look at the other graphics being rendered around then. People have redone this image, and it never looks as realistic.

Don't forget the first rendered fur.

http://simulationcorner.net/fur.png

The bear looks still so nice. Even nowadays The picture is from this paper from 1989:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=74361

Great image, hadn't seen that one before. The lighting model is beautiful.

I remember seeing this image in an issue of Scientific American, and for many years could not believe it was computer generated. It was just so out of the ordinary for CG at the time.

I like the part where he needs a room full of Amigas or a Cray to render the image

Reminds me of a http://reboot.wikia.com/wiki/Null, somewhat. (1987 graphics tech is about right for a 1994 TV show.)

What a fun paper, but seems like a cute joke to me. All that the author did was use the basic wave equation with changed variables to simulate Jell-O. The article has algorithm and theory tags, but this is neither.

I wish they had gone into detail about the numerical algorithm used to simulate the wave equation in three dimensions (Runga-Kutta order 4 probably?). As someone with a physics background, this is far from theory, or even original research.

It's interesting that they mention the necessity of Markov Chains for intersection calculations. Would anyone know if better techniques have been devised since the publication of this paper?

Does anybody know more about the joke with the reference to [Haeberli, 1872], a paper by Paul Haeberli and Paul Heckbert, which is "to appear"?

WHY DOES HE REFER TO HIMSELF IN THE PLURAL?

Standard style in scientific literature. Partly due to blind peer review (using the more general 'we' instead of 'I' to mask the identity/identities of the author).

It's the common style in scientific writing.

Should have added a dog as his coauthor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Past_and_curren...

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