GPH 321 – Completed

In this class we created a ray tracer from the ground up. I by “we” I mean our professor wrote most of the code and we had to fill in certain class functions. It was pretty terrible, but overall the end result was good. Oh and we had to zip our source code and send it in, instead of simply using something like GitHub or Bitbucket. The midterm and final SUCKED, simply because it’s 2015 (well, it was 2014) and written exams for programming finals are absurd. Writing code on paper completely lacks the feel of typing it out using an IDE. Plus, come on, who doesn’t use IntelliSense, Resharper, Visual Assist X, or some kind of code-completion tool? A fool! And that’s exactly what we are when we write code by hand.

Anyhow, here are some screenshots from the course.

First we simply had to get rays working and detecting collisions.

Rays & Intersections
Rays & Intersections

Then we had to ray-trace our first object, a sphere. This is because it’s pretty simple to represent in math.

First Ray-traced Object
First Ray-traced Object

Then we had to add some shading to that sphere. I know,Γö¼├íit isn’t 100% correct. Spot the error!

Phong shading
Phong Shading

Next came shadows. These are awesome.

Ray-traced Shadows
Ray-traced Shadows

Next was reflections. Super easy thanks to how ray-tracing works.

Ray-traced Reflections
Ray-traced Reflections

Then we had to create a checkerboard pattern.

Checkerboard
Checkboard

Finally we were to implement Fresnel equations to properly simulate glass. I didn’t finish this one fully.

Ray-traced Fresnel
Ray-traced Fresnel

And that was the end of the course. This course was online only, which probably had an impact on my view of it. The course notes weren’t that great. I repeatedly found myself Googling things that were phrased in strange ways to figure out how to implement them. And variable names like V, N, n1, n2, etc. used throughout the given code made things unnecessarily complex.

Oh well, it’s over and done with!

Finished with GAM 374

Well, I chose to turn in exactly what you see in that last blog post. Everything that was required for the assignment was there and it earned me a 95%.

I am now focusing my efforts into work with a near-full-time schedule of 38 hours a week. I will be posting stuff about happenings relating to that from here on out.

I’m also working on an Android app, so there will be some Java tossed in.

And last but not least, my love for C++ is growing as I discover C++11 features. There’s a little code I wrote to test out the functionality of some of the new stuff if you read on.

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