Dane W Christensen

About Me

My passions lie at the intersection of linear algebra, rendering techniques, and low-level computing. I have implemented 3D software rasterizers, crafted shader-based ray tracers and SDF ray marchers. Outside of rendering, I have worked both in the image processing space both academically and professionally while at Mobius Imaging (now Stryker) and implemented Zhang's camera calibration method in the context of a structure from motion pipeline.

Outside of school and professional experience, I have two years of teaching experience as an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Idaho, where I taught introductory C++ courses and designed and piloted an introductory Computer Graphics course. Currently I am a researcher at BYU (Provo) in the Computer Vision lab and act as a TA for the senior level computer vision course.

Demos

The Cofactor Matrix Transformation for Optimized Normal Transformations

Demo for (work in progress) technical paper "The Cofactor Matrix for Optimized Normal Transformations". Different normal transformation conventions are visualized. The user can observe the effect of each transform/method. A toy six-sided dice mesh and each face's normal is visualized. The user may:

Visualize the transformation of mesh and surface normals in an interactive context
Choose transformations for rotation, translation, scaling, shearing, projection, and negative flipping
Map normals using the trivial ("As is"), inverse transpose, and cofactor matrix normal conventions

Randomly generated IFS Fractals

An interactable demo allowing the user to observe as affine transformations sets are generated randomly to build each animated IFS. This raster approach to approximating IFS fractals visualizes the mapping of points to these inherently contractive transformations. Specifically this demo:

Generates contractive IFS sets using specially constructed SVD decompositions
Approximates the complete fractal by applying the the IFS transformations for the first 16 iterations
Mouse drag rotation, scrollwheel zoom controls

WebGL SDF Path Marcher for Keyboards (Warning: Requires High-End GPU)

Outside of software, I have a hobby making custom mechanical keyboards, forming keyboard layouts, designing PCBs, and crafting their enclosures. Combining that hobby with rendering, a motivation to create a web-accessible, GPU accelerated SDF path tracer for keyboards emerged. This demo features:

SDF modeled keyboard keys, numpad base, background
SDF texture maps for glyph rendering
Path tracing across multiple bounces, multiple frames for each pixel

WebGL Path Tracer Demo (Warning: Windows Browsers using Angle targeting DirectX May not run correctly)

Proof of concept real-time ray traced scene using WebGL for a scene using triangles, spheres, and a cubemap.

Dynamically compiled AABB, scene geometry in ray march shader
Frames accumulate across multiple frames of sampling, to create refined image outputs
Real-Time Mouse drag rotation, scrollwheel zoom controls