yah, there was a bug in the phong shading in the lower part of the sphere. since (five miniutes after the post) i realized that i had to clip my colors after phong. It has AA, its actualy realy easy to do in java- just set the image to render x larger than you want then scale it down size/x with a sampling algorithm of x acuracy. i discovered that if you do the sampling algorithm twice and only scale it down 1/2 x each time, you get much more accuracy.
i just finished adding painters algorithm to acount for multiple objects, added multiple the ability to have multiple lights and fixed the phong equations a bit. i still think there is a problem with how the specular is calculated in my phong. but as of now i don't have enough time to fix it. the color in the background is not an infinite plane, its actually a color system that i set up that finds the angle of the camera - pixel ray compared to camera -point ray that i was using to help me see if the camera was set up properly and all my vector stuff was working. -the dark in the back is not shadow, i don't have that yet, although both shadows and planes need only a couple more lines of code. that image only took maybe a two or three seconds to render.
best thing about this is my new ability to go up to people and completely confuse them with concepts and algorithms they have never heard of before.
newest image:
