Project 3

Disks, Rings, Boxes, Triangles, and Height Fields

Required Image:

Image scaled down. Click on images for fullsize view.

Performance evaluation here

Creative Images:

This image shows a halogen lamp. The lamp base is a disk, the stem is a long, thin box, the switch is a sphere, and the lamp holder is the bottom half of a sphere, modelled with a height field. The light comes from a white point light inside the lamp holder.

Design choices:
Design choices in this assignment were less stressing than in past assignments
because we mainly were implementing new objects, and thus sticking to the design
choices we had made in last week's projects. Even still, I tried to stay true
to those choices in designing interfaces for the new objects, for instance, but
not much new by way of design has surfaced this week.

I am still having the user of my ray tracing library define scenes by invoking
the geometric and object primitives I have defined in the library. Eventually
I am going to either define a simple file format for defining scenes (that can
be loaded at runtime), or a C++ precompiled module system as discussed in class.
Unfortunately, this week I did not have too much time to spend on this aspect of
the ray tracer.