[geeks] lazy thursday night

[S. Gwizdak]

> > Designing a ray-tracer, and looking for a job.
> Cool. The ray tracer that is.  So, are you going to have it render curved and
> implicit surfaces directly, or reduce everything to polys first?

It's for a class I'm taking. Since all models loaded in are defined in
terms of surface arrays, they are initially reduced to polygons to begin
with. The first part of the class was spent covering basic 3d translations,
hidden surface removal, animation, etc... Now we have rather nice programs
that can handle extrusions and revolutions to create rather complex 
shapes. (Spheres, toruses, stairways.) So the next step is to do some 
simple raytracing. Additionally 3DS/Wavefront file formats were figured out
in the class, so we have a bunch of killer models of really neat things.

I'm currently starting the first major rewrite of what I have already to
make it significantly more organized and efficient. I suspect the second
major rewrite will occur when I want to add things such as bezier surfaces.
The class is set up as a bunch of small projects, but currently there is a 
competition between me and 5 other people to add new features. The latest 
one: outputting to postscript. I hope to have a bunch of posters of toruses,
the enterprise, and wireframe naked women.