This is an image of a non-physically based light transport through a bubble cluster generated as part of REU student Sarah Ciresi’s project. We show a physically based one below as well, but this one just looked too cool not post. This image was produced after we added circular arc rendering to a 2D raytracer, but before we added the actual simulation of light through a thin soapy film. We hope you’ll allow us some artistic license even though we’re mucking around with the physics:

The bubble cluster was generated using our Koebe-Lib library for inversive geometry that we have developed over the past two months. The light transport was simulated with a modified version of Tantalum, a nice GPU-based 2D raytracer designed to simulate physically modeled light transport through a scene.

Here’s a rendering that is more accurately modeling the physics of light passing through a thin-film. Not quite as visually stunning, but still pretty cool:

The light source is modeled as an incandescent light. We used 1.0 for the index of refraction of air and 1.33 for the index of refraction of soapy water. We are not currently simulating any color shift on reflected rays, but may add this in the future. Our walls are also modeled as infinitesimally thick, since the thickness of a bubble wall at this resolution is much smaller than a pixel. The scene was rendered using 12 million simulated photons.

Stay tuned for an initial release of Koebe-Lib’s alpha version, which we expect will occur within the next month.