In the following weeks to come I’ll be posting my progress in RIT’s Computer Graphics II class with Professor Bailey. It’s required to blog about our work as it evolves, and this seemed like an excellent venue! So, without further ado:

Setting up the Scene

In this assignment I began my recreation of Turner Whitted’s famous ray tracer published in his 1980 paper. The assignment was relatively straightforward, but the majority of my time was spent getting the objects to appear as they did in Whitted’s paper. The image I am trying to replicate looks like this:

So, as far as the objects are concerned and the position of the objects… not too bad! Here are the parameters I used to generate the scene:

• Size and location of two spheres:
  • Big Sphere (foreground)
    • X: -1.83
    • Y: 1.1
    • Z: 8.3
    • Size: 1.0
  • Small Sphere (background)
    • X: -0.83
    • Y: 0.35
    • Z: 7.55
    • Size: 1.0
• The size and location of the floor (conveyed by locations of vertices):
  • Vertex1
    • X: -3.0
    • Y: 0.0
    • Z: 10.0
  • Vertex2
    • X: 3.0
    • Y: 0.0
    • Z: 10.0
  • Vertex3
    • X: 3.0
    • Y: 0.0
    • Z: 0.0
  • Vertex4
    • X: -3.0
    • Y: 0.0
    • Z: 0.0
• The location and parameters of your light source:
  • X: -1.5
  • Y: 9.0
  • Z: -10.0
• The location and “lookat” of your camera:
  • Eye
    • X:  -1.65
    • Y: 0.9
    • Z: 11.2
  • Center
    • X: -1.675
    • Y: -0.005
    • Z: 0.65
  • Up
    • X: 0.0
    • Y: 1.0
    • Z: 0.0