CS 970-Spring 2006 Assignment 1

Due date: Feb 6th (in 2 weeks)

For this assignment, you will implement a ray tracer. Your program should be able to render the following kinds of objects:

Spheres
Triangles
Lights (not rendered explicitly)

Objects will have, associated with them, the following information:

Surface type:
- Specular (mirrors and translucent glass)
- Glossy (part diffuse, part specular)
Color. This further specifies the surface properties, and will depend on the surface type:
- Specular: the fraction of light transmitted and reflected.
- Glossy: diffuse color and specular color (for the Phong local illumination model).
- Light objects only: Color.
Transformation: This will be a 4x4 matrix, which expresses the affine transformation that converts a canonical (standard) object into the object in the scene.
Bounding Volume: This can be a box or a more simply a sphere that contains the object.

Pseudocode

Your ray tracer should implement the pseudocode described here:

www.cs.unh.edu/~ah/970/a1/pseudocode.html

NOTE! this pseudocode differs from the code given in the sample code described below, because the sample code does not include secondary rays. Read it carefully.

Base Code

I prepared a working ray caster (ray tracer without secondary rays). Working code is available at:

www.cs.unh.edu/~ah/970/a1/code.html

The full specifications for this ray tracer are on last term's CS 770/870 assignment 4 web page. This includes:

Matrix Decomposition

To find the bounding sphere of a transformed sphere, you may want to get some information about a given transformation matrix.

Here is program that gives you this information.

Test Scene

Having trouble debugging your code? Try this test scene .

Alejo Hausner, Dept of Computer Science, University of New Hampshire

Last modified: Tue Feb 7 16:57:08 EST 2006