Ray Tracer Checkpoint 1 – Setting the Scene

The ray tracer assignment is a quarter long project for Computer Graphics II. Since building a ray tracer is a pretty ambitious project as a whole, it's been divided into more manageable milestones.

The first and easiest milestone is to just create the scene geometry to be ray traced. In this case, the scene is a recreation of Turner Whitted's first ray traced scene. It was recreated using OpenGL; as such, not everything is completely accurate.

Scene Geometry

• Camera
  • Position: (0, 0, 0)
  • Forward: (0, 0, -1)
  • Up: (0, 1, 0)
• Floor Corners
  • (7, -5, -38)
  • (-13, -5, -38)
  • (7, -5, -8)
  • (-13, -5, -8)
• Big Sphere
  • Position: (0, 1, -13)
  • Width: 3.125
• Small Sphere
  • Position: (-3, -5/3, -18)
  • Width: 3.125

I was pretty adamant about keeping the spheres the same size (as I believe they are in the original, but one is further away) and the camera at the origin. This led to an acceptable recreation, but some pretty unusual values.

 Results

 

Original. Whitted, 1980

Recreation