kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kurt A. Geisel) (04/22/89)
I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am having trouble finding PD ray tracers for the Mac. Are there any? (Has DBW been ported?) Where are they located? Any information will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, - Kurt Kurt Geisel SNAIL : Carnegie Mellon University 65 Lambeth Dr. ARPA : kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu Pittsburgh, PA 15241 UUCP : uunet!nfsun!kgeisel "I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, BIX : kgeisel briefed, debriefed, or numbered!" - The Prisoner
sho@pur-phy (Sho Kuwamoto) (04/23/89)
In article <4YHragy00W0-MAilU2@andrew.cmu.edu> kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kurt A. Geisel) writes: >I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am having trouble >finding PD ray tracers for the Mac. Are there any? (Has DBW been >ported?) Where are they located? I was just going to ask the same thing. Also, is there one with source code? In either case, I would also be interested in any information. -Sho
jkjl@munnari.oz (John Lim) (04/26/89)
In article <4YHragy00W0-MAilU2@andrew.cmu.edu> kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kurt A. Geisel) writes: >I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am having trouble >finding PD ray tracers for the Mac. Are there any? (Has DBW been >ported?) Where are they located? Jason Castan (castan@munnari.oz) and I ported a Ray Tracer posted to comp.sources.misc (or was it .unix ?) to the mac. You need a Mac// to view it though. Let me check the copyright first to see if we can post modified sources. If everything is ok, will post it to comp.mac.sources. john lim
rbrewer@reed.UUCP (Robert S. Brewer) (05/02/89)
In article <4YHragy00W0-MAilU2@andrew.cmu.edu> kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kurt A. Geisel) writes: >I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am having trouble >finding PD ray tracers for the Mac. Are there any? (Has DBW been >ported?) Where are they located? > >Any information will be greatly appreciated. > >Thanks, > >- Kurt The short answer is yes. I currently have both DBW 1.0 and QRT 1.4 running on the Mac II. The long answer is a little bit more complex... I found DBW 1.0, binary only, on GEnie. Unfortunately, it was compiled with an early version of LSC (2.something) and so it didn't use the 68881. As a result it was godawful slow. Luckily, it did come with a postprocessor, written by Bill Bond, but that was binary only also. I managed to obtain the source for DBW 1.0 from an Amiga person (hi kjohn!) and so I have compiled it under LSC 3.0x (using the 68881) and it works just like the Amiga version. It is still quite slow, and the input file format is really attrocious. I also have QRT (Quick Ray Trace) 1.4 running on my Mac II. It is much faster than DBW, but lacks some of DBW's nice texture mapping features. I have the source for 1.5, but haven't gotten it compiled yet. I have written my own very crude postprocessor, which is slow and doesn't use all 256 colors. The third and final raytracer I have lying around is the MTV raytracer. I have the source for the second release, but have yet to get it compiled. I would be willing to post the binaries for any of the above, but I would be more reluctant to post source for any of them. I obtained source for two of the three above raytracers from the net, and don't really want to repost them unless absolutely neccessary. If you have FTP access, a great raytrace archive is available at drizzle.cs.uoregon.edu maintained by Mark VandeWettering (after whom the MTV raytracer is named). Are there other people interested in generating photorealistic images on the Mac? Does anyone have any of the outrageously priced commercial packages that are available for raytracing (Sculpt-Animate 4D, MacTracer, etc)? -- Robert S. Brewer Bitnet: RBREWER@REED.BITNET, Usenet: rbrewer@reed.UUCP Student at Reed College GEnie : R.BREWER "Thank you." - Lt. Commander Worf
trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (05/03/89)
In article <12625@reed.UUCP> rbrewer@reed.UUCP (Robert S. Brewer) writes: >In article <4YHragy00W0-MAilU2@andrew.cmu.edu> kg19+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kurt A. Geisel) writes: >>I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am having trouble >>finding PD ray tracers for the Mac. Are there any? (Has DBW been > The short answer is yes. I currently have both DBW 1.0 and QRT 1.4 >running on the Mac II. The long answer is a little bit more complex... Just offhand, I'd be interested in a raytracer that lets me map some images onto a plane and then reflect them off geometric objects. What I'd like to do just for fun is hack it so that I can generate images of a plane that contains the Mandelbrot set and move some reflective balls over and around it, generating an animation like the infamous MandelZoom I did a few years ago. That was fun; after a month of evenings and over 100 billion floating point ops, there were scorch marks on top of the 68881, but it sure did look purty. -- Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc. !uunet!biar!trebor | trebor@biar.UUCP "The lamb will lie down with the lion, but the lamb won't get much sleep." -- Woody Allen.
pepke@loligo.cc.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke) (05/04/89)
I am working on an implementation of Paul Heckbert's median cut algorithm for displaying RGB files using any number of colors in a color lookup table. This algorithm does a pretty good job of choosing good colors to represent an image, even when only a small number of colors are available. I ported it to the Mac yesterday, and it can now convert MTV raytracer files to NCSA Image files (as an MPW tool). In a few days I should have a Mac user interface version with on-screen displays and variable number of colors, and later I may add tweakable partitioning criteria, editable visual response curves, locally optimizing perturbations, etc. I will try to get a Mac Tutor article out of the source, but I will try to make the binaries available anyway. If you want to see the program be able to support other kinds of input and output files, send me their specifications, including file type and creator and preferred suffix (such as MTV's .pic). Eric Pepke ARPA: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu Supercomputer Computations Research Institute MFENET: pepke@fsu Florida State University SPAN: pepke@scri Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052 BITNET: pepke@fsu Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions. Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.