Phong is a Cool Guy

Hey! We got lighting that doesn't cost us an arm and a leg that's pretty cool! These past two weeks assignments to get lighting working in WebGL haven't been nearly as bad as I thought they were going to be and I mostly ended up struggling with sort of unrelated issues in the assignments. In the first part of the assignment I had a couple of issues with the reflection vector that caused specular highlights to not show up on the plane, even though they did correct appear on the sphere. I got a little bit of help from Learn OpenGL to fix up the formula and then completed the assignment. Unfortunately, like a fool, I forgot to record any video of any of the issues I had so I don't remember the specifics.

The second part of the assignment also went quite well, although I did have a little bit of trouble changing the shader to use the light position instead of the direction. Initially I had it in my head, for some reason, that in order to get a vector that goes from one point to another you just do to - from. Obviously that's reversed but it took a bit of looking around to figure out wha was going wrong with that one.

Once I figured that out, it was smooth sailing until we got to adding the new, unshaded, geometry to the light position. I had a lot more trouble with this than I really should have, mainly because I tried to take the easy way out which led to things getting all messed up and becoming even more complicated. To begin with I accidentally overrode the entire world matrix into just a translation to the light position. The I tried to do something hacky to just add the light rotation onto an already setup world matrix to avoid reapplying the scale and translation. By this point I was pretty deep down in a rabbit hole so I deleted pretty much the whole thing and just started over. All in all it wasn't that big of a problem but it really shouldn't have taken me as long as it did. My brain was too full of Game Dev stuff I guess haha.

My partner and I worked ok for this project. I think we both had a fairly strong understanding of the material so there wasn't too much back and forth but we did help each other out a little bit. I ended up doing most of the work for both assignments in class after they were assigned so I was able to provide some nice hints and information about how I went about doing the todos. I didn't end up needing to go to any office hours, although as mentioned above I did seek out a couple additional resources for getting my specular function right.