I'm home in London now, which is pretty sweet because I can just relax for a couple weeks with nothing to worry about. I will almost certainly accomplish nothing, and I'm OK with that.

I'm reading the complete Chronicles of Narnia, and it's pretty good so far. Also, I watched Donnie Darko last night and that was a really cool movie. It gets to go on my movielist. That bunny is the creepiest thing ever.

Hmm...so yeah, not much else happening. It looks like Apocalyptica is coming back to Toronto in September so Matt and I will probably try to check that out again. Oooh, I also forgot Jen's birthday and have absolutely no good excuse. So I stole her an eCard to make up for it. Haha. At least I'm not as bad as Ryan though.

Well tonight was special. I was supposed to have my Databases final, but five minutes before the start the professor informed us that the Registrar's Office, which is responsible for printing the exams, did not print anywhere close to enough. He attempted to get the correct amount printed out, but not having access to good equipment on short notice he pretty much failed. Apparently there is a policy that states that if the exam is more than 30 minutes late in starting it must be rescheduled to a later time. By 8:00 we were still short 40 copies so we ended up not writing this evening.

This kinda sucks because the exam will likely be rescheduled on the last day of exams. Also, I was ready for it today and wanted it to be over with. But I understand that sometimes things go wrong and stuff doesn't work out. What I don't understand is the reaction of many of the people who were supposed to write with me. There was a lot of intense anger and what seemed like no attempt to understand the professor's situation. He is obliged to follow policy. If he were to get us to wait longer than 30 minutes and try to force us to write the exam, any student who wasn't happy could complain to the registrar afterwards and cause a lot of problems. It's not unreasonable to suspect that some students leave an exam unhappy, that happens regardless of other circumstances. Students who originally thought it would be OK to disregard the policy might "suddenly" change their mind if the exam were to go poorly for them. For the professor, it just isn't worth the hassle.

Even if everyone "agreed" that it would be OK to have the exam tonight and disregard the policy, there would still have been the potential for students to complain to the registrar afterwards about feelings of peer pressure. I'm pretty sure anyone who disagreed to having it tonight (given the opportunity) would have been treated severely be the rest of the students. It was a pretty nasty situation.

I am somewhat sympathetic to those students who have plans that may be disrupted by this event, but not too much. This is an upper year class. By now everyone should know that things can happen and exams can get rescheduled. There are a million things that could disrupt an exam at any time of year, it doesn't take a lot of effort to see that. You take a risk by planning something before the end of the exam period. Normally it works out but sometimes it doesn't. You have to be prepared to accept that. It isn't the professor's or anyone else's responsibility to fix it.

So every once in a while I read Fark which is basically just a news aggregation site. It links to news articles and gives a short and normally amusing description of the article. Today there is a link to a BBC article regarding when the US will leave Iraq and the summary is:

"Bush rejects pulling out of Iraq early. Undersecretary of Innuendo Glenn Quagmire heard to comment, 'Heh heh allll riiiiiiight'"

For anyone who has watched The Family Guy that's just hilarious. I'm still laughing about it.

Part of what I love about shows like The Family Guy, The Simpsons, Futurama and others (generally animated) is the social commentary -- both in the shows and generated by people influenced by the shows (as above). That statement communicates a lot of information about a whole bunch of issues. I don't know why the commentary is more prevalent in animated shows though. Maybe because the people who might try to stop it don't pay as much attention to animation because they think it's just for kids. Such a silly opinion. Some of the best TV is animated. Oh well, someday people will learn, or the people who don't will die and then there won't be any people like that left.

Time for finals!

Well, I finished my ray tracer. By which I mean today is the due date. It turned out pretty well I think, but I won't know for sure until tomorrow. I created a series of web pages for the presentation and they are posted on this site. I've added a link to my menu above, or you can click here. Be sure to check out the movie in addition to all the images, and, if you are so inclined, the documentation gives a fairly thorough technical description of a lot of the stuff.

Here is my final scene, I'm pretty happy with the modelling of it, but I never got the lighting quite right. There are area lights in each of the lamps over the pictures, but they illuminate too much of the scene. There is also another area light located on the ceiling. The rendering of this image took a very very long time.

Final Scene

So I think bump mapping is working, which means that I just have to create a unique scene, do a ton of documentation and create a presentation for the whole mess. Otherwise I'm mostly done my project! Sweet!

bump mapping example

I did soft shadows and planar light sources today. The following image has a square light source (represented by the plane at the top of the image) and uses 25 shadow rays per intersection point to determine shading.

soft shadow

I finished off my noise-based solid textures, they turned out pretty well. Here are some samples. The first is just noise, the second is wood grain and the third is marble.

noise solid texture

wood solid texture

marble solid texture

I've been working on texturing my primitives lately and have succeeded in completing bitmap texturing and simple solid texturing. I still have to create "interesting" solid textures using Perlin noise; hopefully that will work out.

Here are some sample images, first of bitmap texture mapping, then of a simple solid texture:

simple bitmap texturing

simple sollid texturing

Reflection and refraction are working properly now. Refraction took a lot longer than reflection to get right (since reflection only took 10 minutes). I had to adjust some colour stuff so the earlier reflection image I posted is only mostly correct. Here are two sample images demonstrating reflection and refraction:

Refraction test

Reflection test