Describe DougJohnston/assign1 here.
When using the area light sources, it took a couple moments to figure out that:
- The discs are created along the z-azis b. The light sources initially point in the +Y direction
which is not intuitivly obvious from looking at the scene description file.
It took some amount of trial and error to get the luminocity parameters of all the lights correct, especially in the 4th configuration. When doing so, the rendering was much quicker when using only 1 sample per ray, and 1 sample per area light source
I found it odd that the intensity of an area light souce increased when the surface size increased. I assumed that the luminocity would be scaled to a unit sized shape, but apparently bigger objects give off more light when the luminocity stays the same. Edit: After attending today's lecture on lighting, these parameters make more sense.
Overall, this assignment was relatively straightforward, and only took some time to tweak everything.
In the 4th config, I made the background light a bit smaller than the example to make it more visible, and sllightly cast a shadow from the main light to show the effect of the fill.