davidpaulrosser{blog}

I recently purchased HoloToy from the app store. It was developed by Kode80.

HoloToy is an interactive hologram unlike anything seen on the AppStore before. Using anamorphosis perspective projection and the accelerometer HoloToy produces realtime images that emulate reality based on a constant viewing angle.

You can watch a video of it in action by clicking here.

One of the scenes in HoloToy is the Cornell Box. Since I started learning Maya I’ve seen renders of the Cornell Box appear throughout various forums. So, for a fun little project I decided upon re-creating the Cornell Box in Maya.

The Cornell Box

The Cornell Box was an experiment created by the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics. The test was created to determine the accuracy of software renderers by comparing the render to a photograph of the same scene. By measuring lighting, geometry, and material reflectance properties software developers can achieve photo realism through their software renderers.
You can read more about The Cornell Box by clicking here.

Creating the room

I couldn’t find any exact dimensions for re-creating the room, so I created the room to the size of the default grid in Maya. As you see below, I have one area light with Maya’s default light disabled.

I found a useful post here by Illuminate Labs (The ones who create BEAST and Turtle). They give a detailed description on how to set up the lighting using Turtle. Since I don’t have the plugin for Maya I had to workaround the settings.

With the Area light selected in the scene I had to set up Global Illumination. Global Illumination in a brief description adds more realism to a scene. It takes into account the rays projected from the light source and when rays bounce of other surfaces within the scene. This effect lights up the scene in a more realistic manor. You can see below my Area light settings:

I found the initial Photon Intensity value too high for the scale of my scene. So I lowered it to 7000. The rest was left to default settings. I then set up Global Illumination and Final Gathering in the Render Settings which you can see below:

Final Gathering improves the quality of the Global Illumination solution. To read a more in depth on Final Gathering click here.

The result

You can see the results from this experiment below. There is a high amount of diffuse reflection between the walls. This may be down to the Photon Intensity or the Lambert diffuse amount.