In the fifth semester of my Bachelor’s, there was an exciting module coming up: the semester project. Finally applying the theory of the last two years in a hands-on project. Me and six of my classmates that I had become friends with were all quite excited.
Due to personal reasons, I wasn’t able to attend the introductory lecture. Therefore, my friends informed me that the objective of the project would be to develop a 3D scene editor with integrated ray tracing, a technology from computer graphics that allows to render realistic images. Two of my friends are huge computer graphics nerds. I knew something was about to happen. But I did not expect what actually happened.
Two weeks after the project goal got announced, every team did a presentation to showcase their vision for the project. My team did not only present a vision, but also a working path tracer, which is an extended concept of a ray tracer that allows to render hyper-realistic images. That prototype was written by one of my nerd friends in the first two weeks from scratch, which took him about 100 hours. It sounds crazy to do that during a semester, and it is. But after that presentation, motivation was through the roof. I think my serotonine levels have never been as high as during that day. Everyone in the team knew that we were about to create something outstanding.
The following weeks continued to be an amazing experience. I took an important part in the project by designing and implementing the software architecture as the Chief Architect of the team. Hence, the project meetings were always valuable to me, and the best moments for me were the ones when I stood in front of the whiteboard with on or two colleagues, discussing the next big decisions to be made. As a management methodology, we used Scrum; it was a great learning experience witnessing agile development first-hand.
The project concluded just like it started. After almost having finished all features we thought necessary with roughly one week left, my other nerd friend and I stayed up late and added a feature to not only render images, but also videos. An animation system! With that, we prepared a video montage for our final presentation. I have added the video at the end of this post.
Not all things went perfect, of course. There was a lot of stress involved, since the project was so time-consuming. Also, I think we as a group learned a lot from our mistakes, rather than doing it right from the start. However, in retrospect I don’t think I would have wanted that semester to be any different. With all its ups and downs, this “Project Royal Tracer” was the most amazing experience I have had during my academic life so far.
Cheers,
Niklas