For next Wednesday you need to implement a basic ray tracer. We are going to have two ray tracing assignments (and possibly a third, if there is time). This basic one is to get you started. Then we will have a more advanced one in which you get to add the bells and whistles.

In this basic assignment I'd like you to ray trace to a collection of spheres. You can just shade each sphere a solid color for this assignment. That means you don't need to worry yet about bouncing rays off the sphere to create reflections. You just need to shoot that first ray from the camera, through the image plane, and see which sphere you hit first.

Try to make the spheres into an interesting scene. There are all kinds of interesting scenes you can make using only spheres: snowman, planetary system, caffeine molecule, ... Feel free to try one of those or else to use your imagination.

All the mathematics you need to do this assignment were covered in the first ray tracing lecture, and in the on-line first raytracing notes.

Also, you'll want to extend class PixApplet.java, discussed in class today, because that is a more efficient way to create an image pixel-by-pixel in a Java applet. We created a simple template in class today called testPix.

As usual, your assignment should be in the form of a Java applet, which you should post to our web page.