Introduction:

Check here for Part 1 or Part 3

Last time, in part-one, we established the assumptions that we are going to make about our raindrops. These assumptions included the shape, the different rays we will consider, refraction, reflection, total internal reflection and also the Fresnel effect. This time we will discuss our first approach to solving the problem.

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Introduction:

Click Here for Part 2 or Part 3

While I was at Hiroshima University from 2007 to 2009, I worked with a friend, Marcos Slomp, who was a Brazilian PhD student. My research was on rendering raindrops, which was an extension of Dr. Kaneda’s raindrops on a front glass research. We experimented with a couple of interesting ideas before we discovered the method which would work for us, and I find it to be an interesting and intriguing story about discovery, the development of ideas, and over-coming a difficult challenge. I also find this story particularly interesting because it shows that we didn’t just wake up one day with the solution but it was necessary to attack the problem iteratively,  step by step, from a variety of different directions.

So for this story, I am going to make three parts, part one is today and I will show you where we started and what types of results we derived. Next I will discuss part two, how we changed our approach and tried a new idea, that also failed to work. Last, I will conclude with part three that shows the final solution.

I like this story because it is from real life and because for me it does such an excellent job of capturing the nature of research, from start to finish. While our results answer some questions, including our primary task, it, as with most good research, poses its fair share of new questions which have yet to be answered.

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