craig@weedeater.math.yale.edu (Craig Kolb) (09/21/89)
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.