Program 5 - Spatial Data Structures

This assignment is due on Saturday 6/2.

Overview:

Goals for assignment 5:

For this portion of your ray tracer, your program needs to:

• compute intersections and appropriate shading for boxes
• handle large files (e.g. balls2.pov and bunny.pov) in reasonable times by including a spatial data structure in your code to optimize ray intersection testing
  • e.g. a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), binary space partitioning tree (BSP tree) or an oct-tree

You will also need to create your own visually interesting scene that you render and submit the .pov file.

Program execution:

Your program should have the following syntax:

raytrace render <input_filename> <width> <height> [-fresnel] [-ss=N] [-sds] [-altbrdf]

assuming that your executable is named raytrace where the options are:

• input_filename = the name of the povray file to read and render
• width = the image width
• height = the image height
• -fresnel = use Schlick’s Approximation to simulate Fresnel reflection (optional argument)
• -ss=N = use super sampling with NxN samples (optional argument)
• -altbrdf = use a brdf other than Blinn-Phong (optional argument)
• -sds = enable your spatial data structure, e.g. bounding volume hierarchy (optional argument) (new)

and the command render indicates that we simply want to draw the entire scene.

Thus:

raytrace render example.pov 640 480

will render a 640x480 image file, output.png consisting of the scene defined in example.pov.

raytrace render example.pov 640 480 -sds

will render a 640x480 image file, output.png consisting of the scene defined in example.pov using your spatial data structure optimization.

Sample input files and images are given in the input files repository.

Diagnostic/Testing

In addition to the normal execution syntax, your program should support the following diagnostic/testing syntaxes with the given commandline arguments. You must also continue to support all Diagnostic/Testing syntaxes from the previous iteration(s) of the project.

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No new commands (yet!)

If I can come up with a new diagnostic command that will be helpful in solving spatial data structure problems, I will post it here.

Grading breakdown:

• 30 spatial data structure
• 20 points working box intersections