Ray Tracing: Sphere distortion due to Camera Movement - c++

Question

I am building a ray Tracer from scratch. My question is:
When I change camera coordinates the Sphere changes to ellipse. I don't understand why it's happening.
Here are some images to show the artifacts:
Sphere: 1 1 -1 1.0 (Center, radius)
Camera: 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 1 0 45.0 1.0 (eyepos, lookat, up, foy, aspect)
But when I changed camera coordinate, the sphere looks distorted as shown below:
Camera: -2 -2 2 0 0 0 0 1 0 45.0 1.0
I don't understand what is wrong. If someone can help that would be great!
I set my imagePlane as follows:
//Computing u,v,w axes coordinates of Camera as follows:
{
Vector a = Normalize(eye - lookat); //Camera_eye - Camera_lookAt
Vector b = up; //Camera Up Vector
m_w = a;
m_u = b.cross(m_w);
m_u.normalize();
m_v = m_w.cross(m_u);
}
After that I compute directions for each pixel from the Camera position (eye) as mentioned below:
//Then Computing direction as follows:
int half_w = m_width * 0.5;
int half_h = m_height * 0.5;
double half_fy = fovy() * 0.5;
double angle = tan( ( M_PI * half_fy) / (double)180.0 );
for(int k=0; k<pixels.size(); k++){
double j = pixels[k].x(); //width
double i = pixels[k].y(); //height
double XX = aspect() * angle * ( (j - half_w ) / (double)half_w );
double YY = angle * ( (half_h - i ) / (double)half_h );
Vector dir = (m_u * XX + m_v * YY) - m_w ;
directions.push_back(dir);
}
After that:
for each dir:
Ray ray(eye, dir);
int depth = 0;
t_color += Trace(g_primitive, ray, depth);

Answer 1

After playing a lot and with the help of the comments of all you guys I was able to create successfully my rayTracer properly. Sorry for answering late, but I would like to close this thread with few remarks.
So, the above mentioned code is perfectly correct. Based on my own assumptions (as mentioned in above comments) I have decided to set my Camera parameters like that.
The problem I mentioned above is a normal behaviour of the camera (as also mentioned above in the comments).
I have got good results now but there are few things to check while coding a rayTracer:
Always make sure to take care of Radians to Degrees (or vice versa) conversion while computing FOV and ASPECT RATIO. I did it as follows:
double angle = tan((M_PI * 0.5 * fovy) / 180.0);
double y = angle;
double x = aspect * angle;
2) While computing Triangle intersections, make sure to implement cross product properly.
3) While using intersections of different objects make sure to find the intersection which is at a minimum distance from the camera.
Here's the result I got:
Above is a very simple model (courtesy UCBerkeley), which I rayTraced.

Answer 2

This is the correct behavior. Get a camera with a wide angle lens, put the sphere near the edge of the field of view and take a picture. Then in a photo app draw a circle on top of the photo of the sphere and you will see that it's not a circular projection.
This effect will be magnified by the fact that you set aspect to 1.0 but your image is not square.
A few things to fix:
A direction vector is (to - from). You have (from - to), so a is pointing backward. You'll want to add m_w at the end, rather than subtract it. Also, this fix will rotate your m_u,m_v by 180 degrees, which will make you about to change (j - half_w) to (half_w - j).
Also, putting all the pixels and all the directions in lists is not as efficient as just looping over x,y values.