Shooting Rays

The fourth assignment for the graphics course I'm TAing was due earlier this week. This assignment is a ray tracer and as part of it, students are supposed to create a "unique" scene. Unique in this case just indicates that the scene needs to be different from everyone else's, not that it needs to be creative. However, as with the puppet assignemtn, students receive bonus marks if they create an interesting raytracer scene.

As with previous assignments, I re-implemented the ray tracer to refresh my memory on the details and I ported my original snowman scene to the new ray tracer. Students are supposed to implement one extra feature of their choosing in addition to the basic features required by the assignment. Back when I originally did my ray tracer I implemented reflections. This time around, I also added in some anti-aliasing which makes the scene look nicer, but also renders a lot slower, which is not really a surprise since it involves shooting a lot more rays into the scene (five times as many for the way I implemented it).

Here is my new, improved, snowman scene:

And here is a link to the course gallery that has the better ray traced images from this term (they're up at the top): to the exhibit!

That's all for now.

Freak Out,
-TFitC