Refinements and Implicit Attempts

So with the craziness of this week, trying to juggle a bunch of different projects and then going to California to look for housing for next year, it has taken me a while to get up the final version of this blog post, but things seem to moving along.  I have finished adding in most of the refinements I had mentioned last post.  Specifically, I finished redoing the camera class, so that is is actually now storing all the relevent information (view reference point, eye position, view up vector, view plane distance etc., and using gluLookAt to do the camera aiming).  Then as a first step toward getting the interactivity working and to show off the newfound power of the camera class, I set it up so that everything when you Shift+click on a point, it draws a ray from the camera eye through that point (see screenshot below):

I used the camera class from some of the CIS462 homeworks as an extensive reference for setting up the camera.  Once I got the transformations working it was relatively straightforward to then modify the main class to then interface with these methods instead of directly modifying the values of the Camera struct.  For shooting the ray, looking back at the CIS277 course notes was extremely helpful in remembering how to convert the 2D screen coordinates to the 3D world coordinates using the camera up vector, eye position, and center.

Additionally, I also modified the GUI as well as the underlying framework to be able to actually change all the parameters (everything but index of refraction) including color from within the GUI during the simulation. Note in the screenshot to the left all the parameters from last post are now directly manipulable from within the simulation.

It is turning out to be less trivial than expected to code in the implicit formulation framework and then get that to interface with the rest of the program, especially figuring out indexing and how to define the isolevel within each grid cell.  I am continuing to work on building the implicit formulation into the code and experimenting with the Paul Bourke surface reconstruction code.

So the plan right now is to continue working on this, hopefully getting some sort of visualization in the near future. Smaller things can also be tweaked, but for now I think the implicit surface recon is the main thing. Also, now that the ray shooting is working, I'm hoping to finally get some simple drag-click interaction forces in. More to come soon