CPSC 3710 - Computer Graphics Ray Tracing Project
| Home | Images | Challenges | Sources |


Some of the challenges I encountered(apart from choosing my idea).  was to get things to line up juuust right.  With things being just a little off, it bugged me as I know it wasn't on right, but even though it was close enough, that did not matter.

Another problem was getting shapes which were not provided for me created.
For example the triangular Prism which sits as the apex of the roof.
My first attempt at doing this was to take two boxes of the same dimensions, rotate one by 45 degrees, and group them via the intersection command and use that.  that was okay while I did a quick and dirty run through.
I later then discovered i could use square roots, and variables, and other coding tid-bits.  So from that point on, I was always able to get my one's square's hypotenuse to be exactly the length/width of the other square, which resulted in a perfect apex.

and being the resourceful person I am, these apex's also worked great as the side parts of the grain elevators, just with some work of course!

there was also A LOT of trial and error getting things to look right, for example:
In getting the train car wheels to be right on the track wasn't easy.  First time I tried to line them up, even though I swore my math was right, the track was still narrower than the width of the wheels.  So then I double checked my measurements, and sure enough they should have been correct.  Next step is that i figured it had something to do with a translation i did, but again it wasn't.  So in a near last ditch effort I thought, okay I'll make the width of the axle smaller.  That had issues because not only did i havetranslations, but I had a rotation in there.
At this point of frustration, I had the bright idea, why not just make the track wider :p low and behold it worked... who would had thunk it.
A side bonus of this was that with the narrower axle width it didn't quite look right with the height/length of the cars, and widening the track made it look, and feel right.

Another challenge I had was the "fun" of using POVRay, and that was if i wasn't sure how my changes looked, it ment i had to render it, then see, and change as I saw fit.  It's not a major problem, but more of an inconvenience.  It made me quite envious of 3D Studio Max.

All said and done, I am glad that I did use POVRay, as now i understand how it works, I want to do more!