Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!craig
From: craig@weedeater.math.yale.edu (Craig Kolb)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Raytracer available
Summary: Yet Another Raytracer
Message-ID: <73181@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 20 Sep 89 22:38:36 GMT
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Reply-To: craig@weedeater.math.yale.edu (Craig Kolb)
Organization: Math Department, Yale University
Lines: 79

All of this talk of solid texturing and the like has convinced me to pull
together my raytracer for public consumption.  Although I'm calling this a
beta release, relatives of this version of rayshade have been making pretty
pictures for about a year now.  For examples, see slides 32 and 57 from the
SIGGRAPH '89 technical slide set and slides 67/68 from the stereo slide set.

If there's enough interest, I'll post rayshade to comp.sources.unix once
the bugfixes stop rolling in.

Craig Kolb
kolb@yale.edu
--

Rayshade, a raytracing program, is available for "Beta" testing.  Rayshade
reads a multi-line ASCII file describing a scene to be rendered and produces
a Utah Raster RLE format file of the raytraced image.
 
Features:

	Primitives:
		boxes
		cones
		cylinders
		height fields
		planes
		polygons
		spheres
		triangles	(flat- or Phong-shaded)

	Composite objects

	Point, directional, and extended (area) light sources

	Solid texturing and bump mapping of primitives, objects, and
		individual instances of objects

	Antialiasing through adaptive supersampling or "jittered" sampling

	Arbitrary linear transformations of primitives,
		instances of objects, and texture/bump maps

	Use of uniform spatial subdivision and/or hierarchy of
		bounding volumes to speed rendering

	Options to facilitate rendering of stereo pairs

	Support for the Linda parallel programming language

An awk script is provided to translate NFF format scripts to rayshade format.

Rayshade is written in C with parsing support provided through lex and yacc.
The C, lex and yacc files comprise approximately eight thousand lines of
code.  Sites without lex and yacc can make use of the C source files produced
by lex and yacc which are included in this distribution.

Rayshade has been tested on a number of UNIX-based machines, including
Vaxes, Sun Workstations, Iris 4D Workstations, Encore Multimax, AT&T 3B2/310,
Cray XMP, and IBM RTs.  In addition, support is provided for the Amiga using
the Aztec C compiler.

Rayshade makes use of the Utah Raster toolkit, a package consisting of a
large number of useful image manipulation programs, test images, and a
library to read and write images written using the toolkit's RLE format.  The
toolkit is available via anonymous FTP from cs.utah.edu or from
weedeater.math.yale.edu.

Those sites that cannot or do not want to use the Utah Raster toolkit can
make use of a compile-time option to produce images written using a generic
file format identical to that used in Mark VandeWettering's "MTV" raytracer.

This version of rayshade is a "beta" release.  The first "real" release will
include an updated manual page and additional documentation as well as
any bugfixes or extensions born out of this release.

Rayshade is copyrighted in a "Gnu-like" manner.

Rayshade is available via anonymous ftp from weedeater.math.yale.edu
(192.26.88.42) in pub/Rayshade.2.21.tar.Z.  The Utah Raster toolkit
is available in pub/UtahToolkit.tar.Z.