When Class Imitates Life
I get excited when I learn things in class and then see a news story about it soon after. It gets me a little excited that my education is actually keeping me current. Like the other day, I was watching a really boring news interview on the recent financial troubles of Thailand. The analyst compared it to the Asian Financial Crisis that it suffered in 1997. We did a whole unit on it in East Asian Economics. I mean, yes, I did turn it off after like a minute into the video, but nonetheless, I feel worldly.
The other day, I happened upon this story on ray tracing. I saw it on gizmodo and on digg. Basically, a guy managed to add ray tracing into Quake to make it more realistic. I thought it was already implemented in games, but I guess not because it is such an expensive process for the realism. Ray tracing is hard. It was my final project for CS 480, my intro to graphics class. You’d think rendering a freaking sphere is easy, but it’s not. And it gets much worse when you add a light on it, make it shiny, and throw in shadows.
Here’s what 20+ hours of programming and crying got me (and by me I mean our team):
As comparison, this is what I was shooting for:
Read about ray tracing in video games here.
I’m done with my second to last semester. And it’s been a long, exhausting one. I say that every semester so no one believes me anymore. I also always say that next semester, I won’t work myself to death. I got one more