Assignment 3 Camera Simulation

Sean Rosenbaum

Date submitted: ?? May 2006

Code emailed: ?? May 2006

Compound Lens Simulator

Description of implementation approach and comments

...Implementation...

Once all the code for tracing rays through the lens was in place, I found my implementation too bugged to produce meaningful results. While I managed to track down several bugs using the debugger, I was still getting junk. I verified my transformations were working correctly by substituting pbrt's perspective camera into my code. This confirmed that my tracing was to blame. After several hours of frustation, I decided to produce a visualization as suggested in the assignment description. The visualization shows where each lens is located, the path of rays through the system, and the normals of the elements they hit. For simplicity, the visualization is in 2D, with the top display showing the lens from the (-z)-x plane and the bottom the (-z)-y plane. This visualization helped immensely. Shortly after it was in operation I managed to hunt down the remaining bugs.

[CamViz Image]