GUISE work.
Took a little break from GRay. Mainly because I want something a little more visual when GRay is doing it's thing. Right now GRay just posts a progress as a line of text in a console. Rather Ho-Hum stuff. I've been trying to get into UI work from different angles but I keep hitting roadblocks that keep me from moving forward.
I've tried Qt. It looked really nice but I reached a point where I was getting frustrated and I should not have been. I don't like 'C++', that's my personal bias, and having a separate pre-processor wasn't helping any.
I've tried MFC. To much is hidden away and I'm just lost. Certain things are not cleanly done either.
I've tried wxWidgets. Looks very much like MFC. I also was humbled in trying to make a simple dialog and I couldn't get the dialog to behave as I wanted.
I've tried Win32. Very low level. Working with all those window classes and such is a bit of a pain. However I have a lot of control.
Enter GUISE. GRL User Interface Simplified Experiment. It's working at the low level Win32 and is actually using very little of it. Text fields and text rendering of the system are being used. Everything else isn't. One of the goals is to make it multi-platform but I'll just be happy with Windows only. The library is pretty small so it should be easy enough to port. First screen shot...
Like other cross platform UIs, I'm not worrying about looking native. Looking good without a serious performance hit is one of the goals. So far so good I think.
Due to the economic crisis, certain budget cuts had to be made. Some were harder to take than others.
Forth image from GRay.
Added...
- Ambient light.
- Light attenuaion. Traditional unbounded and bounded. Linear and Quadradic.
- Fog. Linear drop off. Camera rays only or both camera and light rays.
I was debating on putting ambient light in. At least in the simple incarnation that you find in most raytracers. The reason I don't like ambient light in the way it's traditionally implemented is because it maked everything so washed out. Ideally I'd like to see a sky light which I might try to put in next. Using similar code to the area lights to calculate the ambient like light. Sky lights will not wash out everything like shadows that don't have much visibility to the sky.
Light attenuation is finally working. Simple silly mistakes. Some not so simple.
Fog was put in. I thought it would be pretty simple to do. It was if I wasn't so tired when I tried to put it in. Sample image above with white fog. Wooo!
Third image from GRay.
Added...
- Soft Shaddows.
Nothing really special. Been busy elsewhere. Soft shaddows are a result of multi-point light sources. Light sources in Gray have are spheres. They can define a number of sampling schemes to produce soft shaddows. This can get rather slow when coupled with anti-aliasing. The above image doesn't include anti-aliasing. I made that mistake during testing and was wondering why it was crawling. Doh!
Still have a problem with my light attenuation code. The image comes out black. Really annoying.
Second bugless image from GRay.
Added...
- Specular Highlights.
- Anti-Aliasing.
- Shaddows.
- Cubes.
- Fixed spheres.
This image was for a competition but I missed the deadline. The image was to depict contrast. So mine is super simple but it's the best the ray trace could do at the time. I missed the deadline because I thought the deadline was end of the month instead of 2 weeks before end of month. Ah well. Not that I would have won anyway.
The sphere was wrong in the first image. It was suppose to be .5 radius but it ended up being something like square root of 2. I have no idea why that was happening but since I was using canned code found on the net I decided to chuck that and write the logic myself. Now they are .5 radius and the code is what I understand. Although the canned code was quite elegant and not as computationally expensive. If I don't understand it fully, I won't use it.
First bugless image from GRay.
Super simple because there is a lot of under the hood work that needed and still needs to be done. Currently only planes, spheres and point lights are handled. Only diffuse colouring, not even ambient lighting exists. No shaddows yet either. I've just started coding this last week so it's not too far along just yet.
I had two rather odd bugs that sort of stalled the work. One was a stupid mistake but appeared as it some other part of the program was wrong. It wasn't of course but its one of those bugs that are extremely hard to track down. The other bug was due to image conversion code. I was getting some psychedelic results and thought all my logic for calculating the colours were to blame but it ended up being the converted to an image format that a paint/web browser could handle. Just another stupid mistake but one that can take hours to hunt down.
Second hike. Mount Seymour. Sore again.
Brilliant weather for a hike. Hard to pass up. Decided to visit the bugs up on Mount Seymour. Unlike the majority of the other hikers I decided to by pass the initialy hike up the tiny trail that parallels the ski slopes. I'm not a great fan of that stretch. So, all by myself I mosy on up the sky slope to where that trail meets with the ski slope instead. Head down for the most part until I decide to look up... Whoa... That's a black bear walking across the slope... Maybe I'll just stay here for a spot until he lazily moves out of my way.
I wish I had the camera ready. I usually put the batteries in when I need them because the pathetic camera I own sucks the life out of batteries like nothing else. In hindsight that might have been a good thing anyway. I don't want to draw attention to myself as the camera makes all sorts of noises. Stupid HP product. But a little something that no one else got to see I suspect. It was kind of cool in a slightly terrifying way because I only decided to look up when I was within about a hundred feet of the boy.
Moving on... Took two wrong turns, trail markers aren't the greatest and the other time I just blindly followed someone else. Unfortunately they didn't know where they were going. Double backed and got back on track.
Long hike but pretty view from up on the mountain. Got sun burnt. Some pictures of the hike.
