CHANGES AND ADDITIONS

A list of the major things that have been changed or added since the previous project:

• Transparency with refraction
  • Total internal reflection
  • Used the Fresnel equations to get the proper transmission and reflection coefficients
• New objects:
  • Flat polygons, points can be non-planar (i.e.: 5-point star may be specified w/ 5 points)
  • Specialized quadrics: ellipsoid, cylinder, and cone
• Inverse spherical mapping for pigment and bump maps
• Smart pointers for all objects and textures to avoid memory leaks
• Support any image format that ImageMagick can handle (read and write)
• Started a framework for animation (linear splines are implemented)
• Rewrite of materials/textures using POV-Ray as a guideline
  • Separates pigment, normal, and finish
  • Nested patterns
• Additional matrix functions that made development easier
• A few bug fixes and improvements
  • All of the known bugs in the previous project were fixed
  • One major speed improvement: using vector multiplication instead of division for boxes and bounding boxes sped up rendering the chess scene by about 30% (rendering time went from roughly 1:35 to 1:05 (that's minutes:seconds) on an AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ with adaptive anti-aliasing). That's HUGE for such a simple change!

OMISSIONS

I had to leave out a few things this time...mainly the convex quadrilateral inverse mapping and an external scene description parser. I just ran out of time. I'll get them next time around.

IMAGES

This one shows the nested pigment patterns:

This one shows pigment maps and polygons:

This one shows pigment maps, bump maps, refraction, and reflection:

Click here to download the source code (authorization required)