I took my laptop home with me over xmas and whilst it doesn't run Vista I decided to just put as many words down as I could and come back and fill in any finer details at a later date. I'm pleased to say it's been a big success - I've now got most of the text written for half of my section. That's around 50 pages so far [grin]
It's been really interesting going over some of the research papers for lighting models (I've done Phong, Blinn-Phong and Cook-Torrance so far). The first time I read them I didn't much understand them - just took the necessary implementation details and ignored the rest; the second and third time I had some context to work with and it made some sense - now I'm starting to REALLY understand how and why these models work.
The finer details of spectral reflectance and (non-)homogenous materials that are introduced in Cook-Torrance have been particularly interesting so far. I'd never paid much attention to what diffuse and specular REALLY meant - I knew how to use them to achieve the desired results, but thats it. Now in the context of homogenous and non-homogenous materials and the approximation of spectral reflectance makes it a huge amount clearer.
Might have to spam the GP&T forums this week asking some questions - A step in the Cook-Torrance paper magically disappears a 1/2 coefficient that seems wrong to me. The same paper also makes references to lists of refraction indexes for materials yet I can't find anything online so I'm wondering where these things are hiding...
Anyway, enough prattling on and using long words in the hope of sounding clever...
I got an unexpected present courtesy of the MVP program last week - a box full of Windows Vista marketing material. Mostly I'm interested in the freebies that came with it - one of which was a nice Sandisk Cruzer 2gb USB memory stick. A very neat little device...
Now I already have a USB stick that I use so I figured I'd give Vista's ReadyBoost a spin. Plug in my new toy and it suggests I reserve 1840mb for the cache - which I presume gives me something crazy like 1GB physical RAM, 1GB HDD Cache and 1.8GB Flash Cache.
So why the hell does Task Manager still report that I only have 35-43mb of free physical ram [flaming]
