14 - Ray Casting HSR
ucla | CS 174A | 2024-03-19 02:35
Table of Contents
Backward Ray casting
- a WS or ES algo
- Forward ray casting is hard:
- Backward ray casting: hoot a ray FROM eye -> through pixel -> intersect with all objects in the world space
- NOTE for complex polygons/polyhedrons, we can draw bounding boxes to make intersection calculations easier

Step 1
- find coords of the ith pixel using the half angle
- then generate the ray (in ES) from eye (origin) through the center of the pixel using the x,y coords of the pixel, then z is at z=1 (we position the grid representation of the viewport/screen at z=1)

Step 2
- check for intersection with each object
- if there is an intersection, then calc intersection illumination
Casting in WS: need to factor in eye coords

Ray casting Spheres
- pick the closest intersection of an intersected sphere
- find the normal at that point:
- if planar polygon, then normal is A,B,C
- else, interp normal given vertex normals
- after plugging ES ray with plane, we solve for the interp param



where we determine A,B,C as: 