I have two things to discuss in the post today, my progress with ray tracing and the beginnings of my design specification.

I had found a good three.js ray tracing renderer example yesterday and attempted to integrate it with my current project. Unfortunately, under the duress of the apparent intensiveness of the model I had built so far, the ray tracer proceeded to crash my graphics driver….

Thus I have reverted those changes made and am planning on looking into building a simple ray tracer, one that doesn’t deal with reflection and refraction at first, and build from there. I have found a good starting point in a WebGL book I found on Primo and am intending to use the example provided and update it to use three.js. I have looked into the refract function of the shader language and as far as I can tell, it is used to return a vector based on two vectors and the refraction ratio. This is probably used in building a ray tracer in the shader code, or it could be used to work out the refraction of the materials. I will have to look into this a little more.

Today I have chosen to start working on my first promised deliverable : The design specification. As I have been working on research and prototyping, it seemed like a good time to start working on a formal design. So far I have written the introduction and the assumptions and considerations I have needed to make for this project.

I shall continue working on both the above tomorrow and am eager to show off my project on the 3rd March to the group, as I am hoping it will give me some confidence that I am working towards the right goal.

I am also including the link to latest version, which includes a sphere with multiple layers, with different refraction ratios. I think I may need to deal with the sphere’s natural refraction which causes an image to appear upside down, though this could also cause the sphere to be unnatural. I will discuss this on Friday with my supervisor. The current link to the latest version is : Version Two