bioglaze's Journal: Fall

Fall is late this year, but last night i really felt it coming, when i was walking with my friends to a student party place. Party was ok, everyone was drunk. Music was average, they played Village People, Rammstein and some others i can't remember.

On the coding front, i have progressed with my 4k real time ray tracer. It can render balls and planes as usual, but i have added support for cylinders, too. Cylinders aren't rendered correctly yet, though. I don't know if it's possible or feasible to use system font in a tiny GNU/Linux SDL application, so i made my own font and a routine to scale and render it under 450 bytes.

I'm attending some interesting courses at the university. One is about artificial intelligence, which i have failed in the past, but seriously try to succeed this time. It's fun to think that we humans can learn to make better decicions if we look how an AI solves problems.

I'm also on a course about 3D modeling and animation. Subject is very interesting, but the lecturer isn't very good, and lecture slides are too full of text. The course is an overview of different techniques, and we have to render some scenes, too. I chose Blender as a tool, because it's free software. Its UI is very different from anything i have encountered so far, but with tutorials i have learned to model some average quality objects.