Chapter 9

A Practical Viewing System

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Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

  • understand how a practical perspective viewing system works;
  • understand the differences between virtual and real cameras;
  • have implemented a virtual pinhole camera.

The axis-aligned perspective viewing I discussed in Chapter 8 is too restrictive to use in a practical ray tracer. I’ll remove the restrictions in this chapter by discussing a virtual pinhole camera with all of the degrees of freedom we’ll need for the following chapters.

9.1 Description

The virtual pinhole camera implements perspective viewing with the following features:

  • an arbitrary eye ...

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