Nick's Design Study
What is A Ray Tracer
A ray tracer is a program the produces pre-rendered CGI. This type of program is used by movie studios to create the effects in a large number of movies. Some examples are Autodesk's Maya and 3ds Max. These suits are available for free; Blender and TrueSpace. In a rendering system the virtual representation of objects in a scene are stored in memory. A ray tracer can generate an image creating a 'ray' for each pixel (for anti-aliasing more than one ray is sent per pixel). The ray is tested to see if it intersects with any scene object, if it does then the color of the pixel becomes the color of the objects surface. The color is modified by lighting and other scene effects.
Ray Tracer Project
Last year in Cosc 363 the first assignment was a ray tracer. I fairly enjoyed this project, despite some of the hair-ripping hurdles involved. It was also a very good introduction into the use of vector maths for me. Although I had some problems that I couldn't fix, I did get some very neat features to work. Such as reflection and refraction. It was a good feeling to build something, basically from the ground, that had been a marvel and a mystery to me for so long. I got it to work but it wasn't pretty. The OO's structures are not very nice, and there is a high chance that I committed a litany of bad design offences. Also Python is not the most efficient of platforms for something this computationally dependent.
Original Python Design
There are a number of aspects of this that seems to just plain smell bad. There is a God class (RayCaster). This class organizes all the scene elements, and controls the ray casting and writing to screen/ files. Also the use of Interfaces is bad/broken. I feel the material part could be much better, more in-depth and flexible. Surfaces such as Sphere and Plane should have their own interface, and perhaps there should be an interface for scene objects.
