Project 2: Rendering unshaded spheres

Goals

In this project, we will add a set of spheres to the world, then rendered them with no lighting. Each sphere can be given its own color, giving us an image like this one:

Three spheres of three different colors. All the spheres are flat.

Three unshaded spheres.

Add spheres to the world

Create a representation of a sphere consisting of two pieces of information:

Add a few of these spheres into the scene.

Add color to the spheres

As you've seen in the previous project, a color consists of red, green and blue components, each in the range of `[0, 255]`. Because we're going to combine multiple colors in future lessons, we will represent colors with components in the range `[0, 1]`. Then, we will convert this into a range our pixel plotting function can accept at the very end, right before plotting a pixel.

Represent a color with three non-integer components, each between zero and one. Add one more piece of information to the representation of each sphere: its color.

Perform ray-sphere intersection tests

For each of the rays you created in the previous project, loop through all the spheres in the scene and perform an intersection test on them. Recall that we found a quadratic equation encoding the solutions of the intersection test:

\begin{array} \\a & t^2 & + & b & t & + & c & = & 0 \\ \left( \Vert \vec{\mathbf{d}} \Vert ^ 2 \right) & t^2 & + & \left( 2 \langle \vec{\mathbf{c}'}, \vec{\mathbf{d}} \rangle \right) & t & + & \left( \Vert \vec{\mathbf{c}'} \Vert ^ 2 - r^2 \right) & = & 0 \end{array}

The variables here are:

Using the quadratic formula, we know the solutions to this equation are:

Start by calculating `a`, `b` and `c`. You'll need to support taking the dot product of two vectors.

Next, calculate the discriminant, that is the quantity `b^2 - 4ac`. There are two possibilities:

Figure out which sphere a ray sees

After performing all the intersection tests for a single ray, there are two possibilties:

In the reference image, we added three spheres of three different colors. The resulting image looks like this:

Three spheres of three different colors. All the spheres are flat.