Shadoka

Shadoka

The Ray Tracer Challenge: Gradient pattern is not a gradient

Hello @jamis and everyone,

I’ve implemented the gradient pattern as described in the book and it gives me this output:

The code for pattern_at (I’ve renamed it to ColorAt) is the following:

func (gp *GradientPattern) ColorAt(point math.Point) math.Color {
	distance := gp.ColorB.Subtract(gp.ColorA)
	fraction := point.X - gomath.Floor(point.X)

	return gp.ColorA.Add(distance.Mul(fraction))
}

As you can see it is not exactly a gradient, but the output makes sense to me.
Our spheres are centered at 0, 0, 0 in object space and at x = 0 the fraction evaluates to 0, which in turn means that we just return colorA.

But I highly suspect that this function is supposed to return an image of a smooth gradient from A to B.
I’m going mildly insane about this issue and if anyone got any advice I would greatly appreciate that.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Marked As Solved

jamis

jamis

Author of Mazes for Programmers and 1 other title

The issue here is that your pattern space needs to be translated and scaled so that the [0,1] range fits the object you’re applying it to. If your sphere has radius 1, and is centered at (0,0), then the pattern (by default) will be covering [-1, 1] (from -x to +x), which means the gradient will be doubled (running once from [-1,0] and again from [0,1]). If you scale the pattern space by 2 (so the gradient runs from [0,2]) and then translate it by -x (so it runs from [-1,1]), it should look more like what you’re expecting.

Hopefully that helps! If you’d like me to restate/clarify anything, let me know.

Also Liked

Shadoka

Shadoka

Thank you so much, that indeed fixes it!

I am facepalming really hard right now, because I already tried scaling by 2 and translating by -1, but I never thought of having to combine those two…

Thanks again for your help and for writing that book, having a blast with it!

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

jimmykiang
This test is broken right out of the box… — FAIL: TestAgent (7.82s) agent_test.go:77: Error Trace: agent_test.go:77 agent_test.go:...
New
GilWright
Working through the steps (checking that the Info,plist matches exactly), run the demo game and what appears is grey but does not fill th...
New
JohnS
I can’t setup the Rails source code. This happens in a working directory containing multiple (postgres) Rails apps. With: ruby-3.0.0 s...
New
jskubick
I’m under the impression that when the reader gets to page 136 (“View Data with the Database Inspector”), the code SHOULD be able to buil...
New
brunogirin
When I run the coverage example to report on missing lines, I get: pytest --cov=cards --report=term-missing ch7 ERROR: usage: pytest [op...
New
taguniversalmachine
It seems the second code snippet is missing the code to set the current_user: current_user: Accounts.get_user_by_session_token(session["...
New
kolossal
Hi, I need some help, I’m new to rust and was learning through your book. but I got stuck at the last stage of distribution. Whenever I t...
New
jwandekoken
Book: Programming Phoenix LiveView, page 142 (157/378), file lib/pento_web/live/product_live/form_component.ex, in the function below: d...
New
Keton
When running the program in chapter 8, “Implementing Combat”, the printout Health before attack was never printed so I assumed something ...
New
dachristenson
I’ve got to the end of Ch. 11, and the app runs, with all tabs displaying what they should – at first. After switching around between St...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
DevotionGeo
I have always used antique keyboards like Cherry MX 1800 or Cherry MX 8100 and almost always have modified the switches in some way, like...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New

Sub Categories: