I'm almost done my ray tracer assignment now. I've got all of the major objectives and I just need to make a "creative" scene of my own as well as look into the viewing transformation.
Here is a new sample image that we are required to render, I'll also post my "creative" scene once it is done.
Because of the cows and the antialiasing, this image took about 9 hours to render.
I've added antialiasing to my ray tracer as my extra feature, it looks really nice. You can especially see the difference comparing the box's shadow to the image in the previous post. The image below used 204,750,000 primary rays cast from the eye onto the scene. That's a lot.
So I've been working on my ray tracer a lot lately, and I've finally made some reasonable progress. Here is a sample image which exploits everything I've implemented so far:
Today is apparently National Chocolate Ice Cream day, so in celebration we bought a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, mmmmmmmm.
Ok, last time for real. I can't afford to spend any more time tinkering with Homer. So here is what should be the final version. I even made the tessellation a bit finer so that the image is nicer.
I did some more work on my puppet. Added a torus primitive which allowed me to give him cuffs on his pants and more definition around his eyes. I also gave in to the painful desire to give him fingers with proper joints. I'm much happier with his hands now in general. Other change include the hair on the top of his head, his ears, the definition of his torso and the size of his arms. Finally I fixed a mistake at the bottom of his right leg. Not sure if I will work any more on it, but if I do I would like to give him a collar on his shirt. I don't think that is very likely though, I really should move on to my other school work. Here is the latest:
Well, graphics is keeping me really busy, so in addition to not having enough time to post, I'm not doing a whole lot that is worth posting about.
Until now...
I just finished my puppet for Graphics assignment three. The assignment is to create a system for hierarchial modelling and then make a puppet using the system. There are all kinds of requirements, like joint range limiting, rotations, translations, etc, etc, so there was lots of work to do before even starting to model the puppet.
I chose to model Homer from The Simpsons because I have this 2x2x2 Rubric's cube of Homer's head which is useful for figuring out how things should look in 3D. I also have a giant Simpsons poster with most of the characters on it, so if it wasn't Homer it would have likely been someone else from the poster.
Here is Homer after rotating the view and "posing" him by manipulating his joints.
Back it Waterloo...the stream of posts shall almost certainly decrease, but maybe I will get around to making selectable themes.
One more day of work left and then it's back to Waterloo for me. This term has some potential to be good. Summer is always fun and Graphics will be neat. Plus my other courses require very little effort.
I just finished reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson (author of Neuromancer - a very Matrix-esque book that existed before the movies). It was really cool because I was able to identify with a lot of the stuff in it. It is set in the present and since it was written in 2003, it actually is the present (more or less). The characters are heavily into the Internet, and the word "Google" is used multiple times as a verb in the book. I just liked how real some of the aspects of the book felt. Like the use of the Internet and the attitudes of the people. Not quite sure how to explain what I mean.
On a mildly related note, my communication skills continue to decline.
I forgot to mention something neat that happened yesterday (well, not neat, but Jen will appreciate it at least). I had to get new peanut butter because I ran out, but when I went to the store I noticed that the packaging of my favourite type (Kraft Extra Creamy) had changed. So I took a quick look at the nutritional information and guess what? Zero trans fat!
