Cow mesh rendering and Bounding Boxes for Poly Meshes

So again I am supposed to be studying for a Midterm but instead I am programming my Raytracer instead cause man this is so fun and awesome. I reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally love this assignment and I am so glad I picked this for my project.

Anyway I tried to Render a very small version of this cow mesh when Matt, Matt and I went to Dairy Queen for Ice Cream. I think it finished after about 30 min or so, and it was really small. I resized the image and implemented Bounding Boxes for my Polygonal Mesh objects, and then tried it again! The small version of the cow took about 5 seconds (not bad eh?) and I tried Rendering this larger image of the cow which took about 3 minutes. I checked and the cow has 5804 polygons so that's not bad.

Check out the renders below and the screencaps to show my speedup for the previous spheres, box and dodecahedron scene.


Awesome cow mesh, rendered in about 3 minutes


21 seconds for non-hierarchical scene before bounding boxes


5 seconds for non-hierarchical scene after bounding boxes