M&Ms Homework Session I 2010

Prof Michael Kazhdan's lectures on Ray-Tracing and Computer Hardware
Due Monday Sept 27th in class

1. Briefly, describe the difference between using ray-tracing for computing direct illumination and using ray-tracking for computing global illumination. Be sure to describe how recusion plays into things.
2. Since computation of global illumination requires using a recursive function call, at some point the algorithm has to decide when to break out of the recursion. Describe a reasonable condition for terminating the recursion.
3. Describe three visual effects that would be difficult to capture using the ray-tracing model described in class.
4. When performing image processing, efficiency is gained by structuring the implementation so that memory accesses are contiguous. In this context, which traversal order do you think is better: Iterating over all the pixels in one row before proceeding on to the next row (Row Major), or iterating over all the pixels in one column before proceeding on to the next column (Column Major)?