Hello World!

My name is Tyler Van Lenten and I am a passionate computer science major at the Rochester Institute of Technology. From an early age, I have enjoyed solving problems and had an innate fascination with creating things. I started programing nearly a decade ago using MIT’s scratch. I used scratch to visualize my ideas and create simulations of the world around me.

Since then, I have advanced greatly building my own graphics programs from the bottom up in C++ and OpenGL. I have also learned software developing techniques and several other languages like C, Java, and Python in my on-going education at RIT.

This website explains some of the many projects I have worked on over the years. My most recent work can also be found on my GitHub.

Whilst programing graphics it started to become apparent that I need a better way to change variables at runtime than just the keyboard inputs and movement alone. So, I created a simple GUI for fun and to speed my development along!

For my Intro to Software Engineering class our team was tasked with creating a web checkers game based off the initial framework given to us. The project was coded in Java using maven and the Spark framework. The goal of the course was to learn how to develop in a Scrum work environment, so we used Sprints, daily stand ups, unit testing, and code reviews.

The goal of this project is for a user to be able to edit, load, and save volume data. The main issue is how to store the volume data. A simple way to store a volume is extending a 2D texture to a 3D texture. OpenGL has great support for 3D textures however, to have high levels of detail large resolutions are needed and texture sizes grow cubically so a 1024^3 texture is 1GB!

Ray tracing and ray casting are terms often confused. Ray casting is simply a ray intersecting geometry to get a color or some data at the hit point. Whereas ray tracing is using rays to simulate light by reflecting, refracting, absorbing etc. Rays are represented by parametric equations typically expressed in equation below.