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From: milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: DBW-Tracer on UNIX
Message-ID: <213@ndmath.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Apr-87 18:53:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: ndmath.213
Posted: Thu Apr 30 18:53:02 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 2-May-87 15:06:05 EDT
Organization: Math. Dept., Univ. of Notre Dame
Lines: 38
Xref: mnetor comp.graphics:585 comp.sys.amiga:4387

Recently I was messing around with the DBW (AMIGA) ray tracing program on a
SUN workstation here at Notre Dame.  The main program (RAY) compiles and runs
just fine here, however there are some things that seem puzzling to me.  The
documents to DBW tracer state the demo program "glass" runs for about 11 hours
on an Amiga.  On the Sun with SKY floating point board it ran 14 hours...the
only reason I can figure is that the Sun version might have automatically 
calculated the picture to greater precision.  If anyone out there has actually
run "glass" on an Amiga I would be interested to see a copy of the output that
comes out at the end of the program run (particularly the number of pixel's 
calculated/guessed info) so I can figure out what's going on here.

The only unfortunate thing is that nobody around here has a high quality color
device to display the pictures on, all the Sun's have monocrome monitors with
no greyscale capability and nobody has any nice frame-buffers or anything along
those lines.  I guess I will have to download the 200k file to an amiga if I want
to see what it looks like.

Anyway, for those who are interested the main ray-tracing program "ray" in the
DBW package (the program that does all the real work of image generation) will
probably run under just about any decent C-compiler on any machine without 
modification.  The thing compiled like a shot on the Sun, no changes required
at all.  The output of the "ray" program should be very easy for anyone to 
convert for display on a good color display.

By the way, please don't write me asking that I send you copies of the DBW tracer
program.  The license on the program states you must distribute only "COMPLETE"
copies with all files and, unfortunately, the copy I have of the distribution
is not complete.  The program is on a lot of on-line services and in users
groups though...so it shouldn't be too hard to find.  Perhaps someone with
a complete copy could post it to net.sources.  Since the program looks like it
could be used on any Unix machine (as well as the Amiga it was designed for) 
I think a lot of people would be interested.

Greg Corson
19141 Summers Drive
South Bend, IN 46637
(219) 277-5306 (weekdays till 6 PM Central)
...seismo!iuvax!ndmath!milo