cs6620 Project 4
Abe Stephens
Required Image

( 1.12852 seconds four threads, 3.03494 seconds one thread. )
Create Images:

This image meets the creative image requirement. There are two phong
materials (green ship and gold sphere), two metal materials (red ship,
silver ship, and silver sphere), and two dielectric materials (cube and
floor). The ships are simple closed meshes.

Menger Sponge made from a metal material. The floor consists of a phong
layer under a dielectric layer.

Dielectric menger spong next to lambertian and metalic sponges.
Description
Performance template may be found here.
I implemented the ray tree pruning optimization for the dielectric
materials. This resulted in a noticable performance improvement. There
appears to be a slight color difference in the height field of the
required image. I implemented both the Phong shader and the Dielectric
Shader by extending a templated parent class. In this way each shader
could use any other material for its diffuse or specular shading
respectively. There is also some noise in the image from single
floating point precision issues.
Time spent: ~ 0.75 weeks. Although I also made some improvements to the
threading mechanism of my ray tracer, as well as implemented some
datastructures to display the meshes.
Difficulty: I think the most difficult part is figuring out how to
control the material properties.