Homework 1
PBRT Installation
The PBRT installation was an incredible pain on Windows with Visual C++ Express 2005. As a matter of fact, it didn't even work in the end. It kept crashing when it was trying to save the .exr file. I met with Kayvon to look over the issues, but having a working build in Windows remains an open problem for me. Hopefully I'll be able get it up and running before HW2. In the mean time, I built it on the myths without a problem and did my work on there (with PC-leland crashing my explorer every 5 minutes).
Method
It took me a while to get a hang of the Camera space coordinates used from the area light source. I didn't really like them, so I ended up using object space coordinates. That made a lot more sense since the lights should always be in the same place with respect to the object rather than the camera.
Results
Here are low-resolution watermarked versions of my results. I used a colored light for the backdrop on configuration 4 so that you could see it better. Also, I fiddled with the exposure and gamma so that it had a better shaped highlight/shadow histogram.
