Grand Prize-Iridescence in Biological Structure Steve Bennett and Arthur Amezcua modeled the color shift in this image using a texture map to modulate the iridescence in a convincing vein structure. To create the image, they used a new color and light module for LRT, which resulted in sweeping changes to many parts of the rendering system.
Honorable Mention-Flower Kok-Wei Koh and Xinru Ng Woo created the only project to implement subsurface scattering. Their final composition uses depth of field to create a soft, natural-looking flower rendering that closely matches their original photographs. The flower was modeled with NURBS, while the pollen in the center was created with a texel-rendering algorithm.
First Prize-Rendering Ocean Scenes Michael Hill and Gavan Kwan created high-resolution height fields to make these ocean waves, generated procedurally in the MathWorks' Matlab. Although the image is technically more of a modeling project, the artists took special care with the height fields, including doing some procedural tweaking of the vertex normals.
Honorable Mention-Reptiles Matthew Everett and Jeffrey Mancuso modeled the famous M.C. Escher "Reptiles" drawing using subdivision surfaces. For the pages of the books, the artists used procedurally deformed NURBS, while the plant was created with procedurally deformed cones. They also implemented multi-texturing, bump mapping, and an iridescent-like shader. In addition, the students modified their renderer to generate light fields, and wrote a stand-alone viewer to adjust the viewpoint and depth of field after rendering.
Honorable Mention-Texel Shader Eric Chan implemented a fur-rendering algorithm, based on a 1989 Siggraph paper, to create this fuzzy doughnut.
Honorable Mention-Manatees Robert Lin and Shari Petersen implemented bump mapping and photon mapping to create these images of manatees.