Caroline Lachanski
I am pursuing an MSE in Computer Graphics and Game Technology and a BSE in in Digital Media Design from the University of Pennsylvania, with minors in Fine Arts and Mathematics. I am currently looking for Summer 2019 software internships.
I’m interested in 3D computer graphics, including graphics software development, animation, rendering, virtual reality, game engines, and game design. I’m always looking to learn something new about graphics!
I currently work with the Penn Library Digital Scholarship Team to build VR/AR applications for visualizing archaeological excavation sites and artifacts, with the goal of making them more accessible to students, other researchers, and interested public alike.
This past summer, I interned at STRIVR, a startup in the Bay Area, where I helped program VR software for immersive workplace communications training.
In my free time, I draw, watch movies, read books, and analyze the media I consume. I’m also an avid K-pop fan.
Multi-month implementation of Monte Carlo Path Tracer, including various integration methods such as direct lighting and global illumination with multiple importance sampling. Culminated in photon mapper using k-d tree. Implemented additional features including thin lens camera, ray marching of implicit surfaces, various light sources (area light, point light, and spotlight) and materials.
Assignment to design an L-system. The user can control the number of iterations (string expansions), the rotation of the plant (how much each paddle rotates), the scale of the paddles, and the color of the flowers. Once given a seed string ('0'), the string is expanded a number of times (based on the number of iterations). It then figures out which drawing functions to call, and calls them using the Turtle (drawing functions belong to the Turtle, who keeps track of position, orientation, etc).
Assignment to experiment with various noise functions. The planet terrain color and height was generated using 3D fractal Brownian motion (FBM). The water color was created with recursive Perlin noise, animated to look like waves. The moon was textured with summed 3D Perlin noise and 3D Worley noise to create illusion of craters. The background color was created with 3D FBM, with star placement controlled by 3D Worley noise.
Animated scene made entirely in shader. Features realtime ray marching of implicit surfaces using signed distance functions.
The particles' movement is controlled by Euler integration. Their initial position and velocity are randomized; they also have randomized masses. I took a lot of inspiration for their physics from springs and Hooke's Law; for example, I make use of a dampening constant and a k value (from F = kx). The particles are colored based on their distance to the origin, or a target point if there is one. The user can left click to attract particles and right click to repel them. The user can select from several meshes to attract the particles to. If you wish to disperse the particles, you can click disperse which assigns each particle a random velocity. You can also edit the number of particles in the scene.
Three person project to develop Minecraft-like game. Implemented procedurally generated terrain with 2D fractal Brownian motion, raymarching and ray-cube intersections for interaction with environment, A* algorithm to determine movement of non-player character, distance fog, and multithreading in terrain generation.
