So my raytracer was done, right? Well, it turns out enough of the class didn't get enough of it done, so we got a 1 week extension. So that means I got another week to work on my scene, right? Well, sort of. Not only did I have other stuff to work on, I was actually pretty happy with my scene, so instead of spending a bunch of time making it better, I implemented two really cool, but turns out not that helpful for my grade (probably) features: bounding spheres and model loading.

First thing I did was bounding sphere, I'm sure you all know why this is helpful. First I started by putting all the triangles in their own spheres (collision against a sphere is much much faster than a triangle, in case you weren't aware). Then I recursively look for the pair of spheres that minimizes the distance between and combined radii, take those and put them in a bigger sphere. I do this until there is only one sphere at the top level (then I obviously have a tree of spheres). Not sure if this is the "way it's done", but it seems to work. In fact, on the scene from the previous entry it rendered 70% faster on my machine :).

I also added the ability to load MilkShape models. It's not as impressive as it sounds, since I had the code to load them laying around from my intro to graphics course, with a little hammering it plugged right in. Of course by the time I got all this working (yesterday), I didn't really have time to make a better scene than what I already had, so I stuck one of the models I had from before (a car my brother made me for my intro graphics final project) in the scene. It's not like it wasn't a little strange already:


right click for full size.