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

abtin
page 20: … protoc command… I had to additionally run the following go get commands in order to be able to compile protobuf code using go...
New
iPaul
page 37 ANTLRInputStream input = new ANTLRInputStream(is); as of ANTLR 4 .8 should be: CharStream stream = CharStreams.fromStream(i...
New
johnp
Running the examples in chapter 5 c under pytest 5.4.1 causes an AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘config’. In particula...
New
belgoros
Following the steps described in Chapter 6 of the book, I’m stuck with running the migration as described on page 84: bundle exec sequel...
New
mikecargal
Title: Hands-On Rust (Chap 8 (Adding a Heads Up Display) It looks like ​.with_simple_console_no_bg​(SCREEN_WIDTH*2, SCREEN_HEIGHT*2...
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
cro
I am working on the “Your Turn” for chapter one and building out the restart button talked about on page 27. It recommends looking into ...
New
jskubick
I think I might have found a problem involving SwitchCompat, thumbTint, and trackTint. As entered, the SwitchCompat changes color to hol...
New
nicoatridge
Hi, I have just acquired Michael Fazio’s “Kotlin and Android Development” to learn about game programming for Android. I have a game in p...
New
dachristenson
I just bought this book to learn about Android development, and I’m already running into a major issue in Ch. 1, p. 20: “Update activity...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Stop developing web apps with yesterday’s tools. Today, developers are increasingly adopting Clojure as a web-development platform. See f...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular wor...
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
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
New
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New
AstonJ
If you’re getting errors like this: psql: error: connection to server on socket “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432” failed: No such file or directory ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Write elegant Ruby code—not just correct, but idiomatic. Go beyond the vocabulary and syntax and learn to express yourself with eloquence...
New

Sub Categories: