HPG 2024 Student Real-Time Competition

HPG 2024 invited you to show us your artistic side by entering our 2024 Student Competition. The theme of our contest this year was “classic computer graphics images and models”, and this year we were asking you to send us your best interpretation or re-interpretation of classic images or models from the history of computer graphics rendering in real-time. This was your opportunity to let your creative side shine!

Entries

Wenjian Zhou, University of Utah — Second place prize 🥈

The shader contains a Utah teapot, rendered with toon shading. And I added a letter U that is modeled similarly to our university’s logo, such that it looks more like a “Utah” teapot. There’s also an animation that the top, spout, handle and the letter U will “fly away” from the teapot. I added the animation to show how each part of the teapot is modeled and combined since the whole scene is modeled with SDFs.

Martin Kacerik, Czech Technical University in Prague

This interpretation of a (lowpoly) Stanford Bunny is inspired by our accepted paper about kDOP BVHs. I quite like the structures formed in the BVH, so I implemented animated BVH levels explorer, with smoothed transitions between the levels. This is my best attempt to fit it to shadertoy in a given time.

Suzuran Takikawa, University of British Columbia

... I wanted to try something unique, so I thought of representing my geometrry with a bunch of spheres. Eventually I arrived at precomputing a hexagonal sphere packing to represent the model to pack the ~3300 spheres for my bunny in only ~5000 characters...

The rendering is done by computing ray-sphere intersections and uses simple Phong shading. Each of these spheres then scatter off into random directions when the shader starts, and can be smoothly brought back into the original bunny shape by clicking and holding down the mouse button.

Murilo Mesquita Carolina, UFG — Universidade Federal de Goiás — First place prize 🥈

High albedo volumetric Stanford bunny using single scattering low albedo techniques

I wanted to experiment and challenge myself and try to achieve a High albedo look throughout the whole material but restricting myself to use only single scattering volumetric terms, as if it was using a BRDF model + some kind of Subsurface Scattering technique to calculate illumination or even a high albedo dedicated technique. This is a topic of discussion in very early papers by Blinn, Voss and Kajiya. Kajiya, in the infamous RAY TRACING VOLUME DENSITIES states exactly that: single scattering approximations are bad models for high albedo volumes. This is definitely an empirical model, not a bit physically based, purely based on how it looks. The key idea is to use a pre-calculated initial light penetration to shade the directly illuminated side of it.

Rules

1. Competitors must write a shader whose output is an interpretation or re-interpretation of a classical computer graphics image, or scene, from previous literature. How you choose to interpret your chosen image as a shader is up to you. Some ideas might include:
   • most accurate reproduction (for things that remain challenging)
   • restyling or reinterpretation of a classic scheme from computer graphics
   • making a scene in some way animated or interactable
   Here are some existing Shadertoys in the theme of this competition:
   • HPG 2022 Cornell Box (warning: this is an expensive shader, please note the header comments)
   • Neural Stanford Bunny
   • Whitted Ray Tracer
   • ASCII Art Utah Teapot
   Submissions should run with “high performance” in the spirit of the conference. In the spirit of being hardware-agnostic, we require that your shader should run faster than the HPG Cornell Box (above) with the following configuration:

   	  #define FULL_SCENE
   	  #define NUM_SAMPLES 128
   	  #define VERSION 2

   For reference, on a 3090 GPU this configuration runs at approximately 25 frames per second.
2. Please submit your entry on ShaderToy, and include “HPG 2024 student competition” in the title. Send a link to the ShaderToy to studentcompetition@highperformancegraphics.org with a copy of the original image or scene you are interpreting, and a description of your re-interpretation. Please set the visibility to unlisted before the competition; we encourage you to set it to “public” afterwards.
   Please note that upon submission you authorize HPG to display your shader during the conference as well as to host it on the HPG 2024 website and Youtube channel. Please make sure you attribute any shaders you may have used to build your submission. We will give proper attribution to the authors.
3. HPG will award one grand prize entry, plus other prizes based on merit as identified by the judging panel. We will announce the composition of the judging panel soon.
4. Eligibility: Anyone who is a student at the time the work is completed is welcome to participate. We encourage submissions from underrepresented groups in our community — please also see the HPG 2024 Diversity and Inclusion Program.
5. Prizes: We are pleased to announce that there are two prizes for winners of the student competition: a Meta Quest 3 and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 series GPU. The first-place winner will get to choose between the two, and the runners-up will receive the remaining prize.
6. Timeline: Submission Deadline: Friday, July 19, 2024 Thursday, July 25, 2024.

Winners were announced during the HPG conference.