comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing FAQ (part 1/2)
Markus Kniebes
Last-modified: 2002/01/12
Posting-Frequency: every 30 days
Who knows others, is intelligent;
Who knows himself, insight has.
Who defeats others, force has;
Who defeats himself, strength has.
Lao Tse
This is the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) List. It's not the most definitive ray tracing
reference you'll ever come across, but then, it was never meant to be.
What it does set out to do is to answer some of the questions which
keep cropping up on c.g.r.r and to give pointers to other references.
It keeps the noise down on the group and we get to spend an extra 10
minutes in bed. This is a Good Thing.
It was originally cobbled together by Andy Wardley,
<a...@peritas.demon.co.uk>, from answers posted to c.g.r.r (actually
from when it was c.g.r), from information people have supplied and from
other existing ray tracing lists and references, most notably, Eric
Haines' Ray Tracing News and other lists. Between 1995 and early spring
2000 Andreas Dilger maintained this FAQ. In March 2000 I started to
maintain this list.
You may distribute this document to whoever, or wherever you like, as
long as you keep the copyright message and give correct attributions
for material used. This is just to stop nasty people with a
substantial lack of moral fibre from taking the document and fobbing
it off as their own. The FAQ belongs to the group, Andy just wrote it.
The latest version of this FAQ is available via WWW at:
http://www.cyrus.ruhr.de/rayfaq/
It is also available via anonymous ftp at:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/
If you only have email, you can get it by sending email to:
with both
"send usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/part1" and
"send usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/part2"
in the body of the message (without the quotes).
If you're only reading this document because your machine is locked
up tracing, remember that all things come to those who wait.
(C) Copyright 1994 Andy Wardley <abw@peritas demon co uk>
(C) Copyright 1995 - 1999 Andreas Dilger <adilger@enel ucalgary ca>
(C) Copyright 2000 Markus Kniebes <kni...@localhost.ruhr.de>
------------------------------
Subject: Table of Contents
What is Ray Tracing?
1 - Ray Tracing Software
1.1 - POV-Ray
1.2 - Rayshade
1.3 - Radiance and ADELINE
1.4 - Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT)
1.5 - Polyray
1.6 - Vivid (including BOB)
1.7 - Tachyon
1.8 - Others
1.9 - Non-Ray Tracing Software
2 - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Mailing Lists
2.1 - FTP and Web Sites
2.2 - Mailing Lists
3 - Modelling Software
3.1 - SCED
3.2 - POVLAB
3.3 - MORAY
3.4 - GUM
3.5 - Breeze Designer
3.6 - Other Modellers
4 - Utilities and Other Software
4.1 - Image Display/Conversion Programs
4.2 - Format Conversion Utilities
4.3 - Creation Creators
4.4 - Texture Editors
4.5 - Animation
4.6 - Miscellaneous Utilities
5 - Further Information and Resources
5.1 - On-line Resources
5.2 - Other Newsgroups
5.3 - Books
5.4 - Image Libraries
5.5 - Texture Libraries
5.6 - Internet Ray Tracing Competition
6 - Frequently Asked Questions
6.1 - "Can I post binaries/images to this group?"
6.2 - "Where can I find model data for..."
6.3 - "How can I view these pictures?"
6.4 - "What's the difference between rendering and ray tracing?"
6.5 - "This picture doesn't trace."
6.6 - "I traced my picture, but I can't see anything."
6.7 - "I traced my picture, but the output is garbage."
6.8 - "What does this mean..."
6.9 - "Rotating/Scaling this object doesn't work properly."
6.10 - "Why is the Z axis is pointing the wrong way?"
6.11 - "Which 3D accelerator card will speed up raytracing best?"
6.12 - "Who is..."
7 - Roll The Credits...
------------------------------
Subject: What is Ray Tracing?
Ray Tracing, in a one-line description, is a method that allows you to
create stunning photo-realistic images on a computer. All you need is
a computer, some ray tracing software, a little imagination and some
patience.
The first stage of creating this masterpiece is to "describe" what it
is that you want to depict in your picture. You may do this using an
interactive modelling system, like a CAD package, or by creating a text
file that has a programming language-like syntax to describe the
elements. Either way, you will be specifying what objects are in your
imaginary world, what shape they are, where they are, what colour and
texture they have and where the light sources are to illuminate them.
Having done all of this, you feed it into your ray tracer, sit back and
wait.
And wait...
That's the main drawback of ray tracing - it's not fast. The software
actually mathematically models the light rays as they bounce around
this virtual world, reflecting, refracting and generally having a good
time until they end up in the lense of your imaginary camera. This can
quite literally involve thousands and millions of floating-point
calculations and this takes time. Tracing images can take anything
from a few seconds to many days. It's a long process, I know, but the
results can make it all worth while.
Ray tracing isn't the only method for creating photo-realistic
pictures. There are packages like 3D Studio which uses scanline
rendering, Radiance, which uses radiosity, and so on. Although these
don't count as ray tracing, the methods you use from one system to the
next are often sufficiently similar to warrant their discussion in this
group. So if you think it's relevant, feel free to bring it up. These
systems will be mentioned in a little more detail later on.
------------------------------
Subject: 1 - Ray Tracing Software
------------------------------
Subject 1.1 - POV-Ray
* The Persistance of Vision Ray Tracer (POV-Ray) is an all-round
excellent package, but there are two things that particularly make it
stand out above the rest of the crowd. Firstly, it's free, and
secondly, the source is distributed so you can compile it on
virtually any platform. It's without doubt the most used package
among the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing crowd and well worth
checking out if you haven't already.
POV-Ray is based on David Buck's original ray tracer, DKB-Trace and
has been (and still is) developed and supported by a whole crowd of
people on CompuServe's POV-Ray Forum (GO POVRAY).
The official distribution site for POV-Ray is Compuserve's GO POVRAY
forum, but on the Internet, the official FTP and WWW sites are:
ftp://ftp.povray.org/ [165.113.121.81]
http://www.povray.org/ [207.159.132.159]
However, at times the access to povray.org is erratic, and it can
also be very busy, so there are a number of unofficial mirror sites
(see 2 - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Mailing Lists).
The files that make up official 3.1g versions of POV-Ray are:
- povmsdos.zip MS-DOS 32-bit binary, scene files, and docs
- povmsd_s.zip MS-DOS source code
- povwin3.zip Windows 32-bit binaries, scene files, and docs
- povwin_s.zip Windows source code
- pve-cv6.zip Visual C++ v6 compiled versin of pvengine.exe
- povlinux.tgz Linux for x86 ELF binaries, scene files, and docs
- povuni_s.tgz Unix source files
- povuni_d.tgz Unix documentation, include, sample scene files
- povmac68.sit.hqx Mac 680x0 with FPU binary, scene files, docs
- povmacnf.sit.hqx Mac 680x0 witout FPU binary, scene files, docs
- povpmac.sit.hqx Mac PowerPC binary, scene files, docs
- povmacs.sit.hqx Mac source files
- povam020.lha Amiga 68020/68881 version
- povam040.lha Amiga 68040 version
- povamsrc.lha Amiga source files
There is also an official version of POV-Ray for Amiga available at:
http://www.amigaworld.com/support/povamiga/
If your system is not in this list, it is recommended that
you use the generic Unix sources for compiling POV-Ray. You can also
find the above archives packaged in different formats or binaries for
other platforms.
If you have access to several networked computers and a compiler,
it is possible to have POV-Ray render using multiple CPUs using
the PVM system of distributed computing. More information is at:
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/povray/pvmpov.html
There is a large collection of software related to POV-Ray available
on the Raytrace! CD-ROM from Walnut Creek. This includes modellers,
viewers, utility programs, scene files, and rendered images. For
For your browsing pleasure, you can have a look at almost the whole
contents of the CD-ROM at http://www.aussie.org/products/
* MegaPoV was formerly known as UVPov, SuperPatch and MultiPatch. This
is not an official compile of Pov-Ray.
There are version for:
- Windows http://nathan.kopp.com/patched.htm
- MacOS http://users.skynet.be/smellenbergh/
- MS-DOS http://www.stuartgibson.com/
- Cygwin http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/povcyg.html
- Linux http://www.mailbag.com/users/mtgordon/megapov.html
- Linux/ PGCC http://www.bigfoot.com/~nimbus186/nocss/ray.html
- BeOS http://www.bigfoot.com/~nimbus186/nocss/ray.html
- Linux PVM http://www.wozzeck.net/images/pmp/
- Tru64 DEC Alpha http://www.ourservers.net/openvms_ports/
- Source code http://members-proxy-5.mmbrprxy.home.net/ceckak/mpov07/
------------------------------
Subject 1.2 - Rayshade
Rayshade is a free ray tracing package originally developed in 1988
by Craig Kolb <c...@princeton.edu>, David Dobkin, and David Hoffman
for Unix/X11, but it has since been ported to several platforms and
re-written and improved several times since. Several non-Unix ports
are available, including DOS, Amiga, Mac, and OS/2. This is the
program often used by universities for teaching ray tracing and as a
result, it is often also used for research on rendering and object
generation. Because of its extensibility, there are a large number
of user-contributed additions and modifications to the base renderer.
This means that many incredible images and ideas saw first "light"
under Rayshade. The image gallery at the Rayshade Homepage can bear
witness to this. The "official" FTP and WWW sites are located at:
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/Graphics/rayshade/
ftp://graphics.stanford.edu/pub/rayshade/
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~cek/rayshade/rayshade.html
There are (at least) two programs to distribute rayshade traces over
multiple systems. One is inetray, the other raynet, available at:
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/ray/inetray/
------------------------------
Subject 1.3 - Radiance and ADELINE
Radiance is a free Unix software package that adopts a radiosity-type
approach to lighting simluation. A MS-DOS version is now available
as part of the ADELINE 2.0 software package for a site license fee
from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Greg Ward <gjw...@lbl.gov>, discusses Radiance here:
"I've spent the past ten or so years developing a ray tracing program
for lighting simulation and rendering called Radiance. Although it
doesn't use the typical finite-element/form-factor approach of
radiosity programs, it does compute what they compute plus some.
Specifically, Radiance computes diffuse, specular and directional-
diffuse reflection and transmission in arbitrarily complicated
environments.
Here is a short description:
Radiance is a suite of programs for the analysis and visualization of
lighting in design. Input files specify the scene geometry,
materials, luminaires, time, date and sky conditions (for daylight
calculations). Calculated values include spectral radiance (ie.
luminance & color), irradiance (illuminance & color) and glare
indices. Simulation results may be displayed as color images,
numerical values and contour plots.
The primary advantage of Radiance over simpler lighting calculation
and rendering tools is that there are no limitations on the geometry
or the materials that may be simulated. Radiance is used by
architects and engineers to predict illumination, visual quality and
appearance of innovative design spaces, and by researchers to
evaluate new lighting and daylighting technologies.
Radiance has been written up in many technical and non-technical
articles in various journals and magazines. Most recently, a
Radiance-generated image appeared on the cover of the 1992 Siggraph
Proceedings.
There are hundreds of happy Radiance users world-wide, including
public and private research institutions as well as engineering and
architecture firms.
I guess that's all I can think of to say about it at the moment..."
-Greg
The Unix version of the software is free, in source code, runs on
most Unix/X11 platforms, and is available in source form:
ftp://hobbes.lbl.gov/ [128.3.12.38] in California
The Radiance WWW home page can be found at:
http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/HOME.html
A version of Radiance for MS-DOS is available as part of a software
package called ADELINE. ADELINE is being distributed by Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. For detailed information and an online
order form, please see:
http://radsite.lbl.gov/adeline/HOME.html
An FTP site with basic info and an ASCII order form is available at:
ftp://hobbes.lbl.gov/pub/adeline/
------------------------------
Subject 1.4 - Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT)
The Blue Moon Rendering Tools are a set of rendering programs and
libraries, written by Larry Gritz <l...@pixar.com> as a Ph.D. student,
which adhere to the RenderMan(R) standard as set forth by Pixar.
Pixar's implementation of the Renderman standard is a program called
Photorealistic RenderMan (PRMan), which uses a method of rendering
called REYES, which is based in scan-line rendering methods.
BMRT, on the other hand, includes a simple wire-frame renderer, an
OpenGL renderer, and most importantly, a renderer which uses some of
the latest techniques of radiosity and ray tracing to produce near
photorealistic images. BMRT also supports RIB files directly, and
can compile Shading Language (.sl) shaders using the included Shading
Language Compiler (although the output is NOT compatible with the
.slo files used by PRMan).
BMRT is avaiable for many popular Unix platforms and Windows 95/NT
in binary form. The BMRT licencing agreement allows unlimited free
use for non-commercial users, but it must be registered for use by or
for commercial applications. Larry asks that people only download
BMRT from the official web site:
http://www.bmrt.org/
------------------------------
Subject 1.5 - Polyray
The program Polyray is a freeware rendering program for producing
scenes of 3D shapes and surfaces. The means of description range
from standard primitives like box, sphere, etc. to 3 variable
polynomial expression, and finally (and slowest of all) surfaces
containing transcendental functions like sin, cos, log. Polyray
supports rendering in a number of different modes: Raytracing,
Zbuffered polygon rendering (fully textures or Gourad shaded),
wireframe and hidden line, and raw triangles (as ASCII output, one
tri per line).
The texturing in Polyray is not limited to a few predefined styles -
you can use mathematical expressions to modify any part of the
shading.
The main site for Polyray (including source code) is:
ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/unix/graphics/polyray/
------------------------------
Subject 1.6 - Vivid (including BOB)
Vivid is a shareware ray tracer for IBM PC's by Stephen Coy
<sc...@microsoft.com>. Version 2, the current publicly available
version, is available from several FTP sites as vivid2.zip.
Version 3 is expected soon (I expect it is already available [AED]).
Compared to POV-Ray, Vivid doesn't have as many features, but in many
cases it can run faster. Source code isn't available, so the package
is limited to systems which can run DOS executables.
Stephen Coy, Christopher Watkins and Mark Finlay co-authored a book
on Ray Tracing called "Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C".
Distributed free with the book was an example ray tracer called BOB.
This was actually a cut down version of Vivid which did include
source. (see also 5 - Further Information and Resources).
------------------------------
Subject 1.7 - Tachyon
Tachyon is a freeware raytracer for a wide range of systems by
John E. Stone <mailto:jo...@megapixel.com>, the current state is
under development.
Tachyon is a more simple raytracer than e.g. POV-Ray. Its features
are parallel execution, grid-based spatial decomposition, simple
antialiasing, basic beometric objects, texture mapping, volumetric
data sets as seen in the documentation.
Tachyon can be foudn on the web at
http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/
------------------------------
Subject 1.8 - Others
There are many other ray tracing packages available; ART, DKBtrace,
RTrace, RAY4, MTV, QRT, and DBW for instance, and some for parallel
tracing: XDART, RRLib, prt, and VMpRAY. Eric Haines' Ray Tracing
News (see 5 - Further Information and Resources), or the
comp.graphics.misc FAQ for more info.
------------------------------
Subject 1.9 - Non-Ray Tracing Software
* Pixar's Photo-Realistic Renderman
Because of the excellent and sophisticated techniques used in
PRMan, many people think that it is a ray tracer, when in fact
PRMan is a REYES based software package (REYES is based in scanline
methods). PRMan is the grand-daddy of all high-end rendering
packages, and was the source of many of the techniques used in
rendering software today. Pixar showcased their skills in short
animations such as Tin Toy and Red's Dream. PRMan was used to
render the Walt-Disney feature film Toy Story.
There is a newsgroup news:comp.graphics.rendering.renderman devoted
to the discussion of all implementations of the Renderman language.
* 3D Studio
Autodesk's 3d Studio is an interactive 3d modelling, rendering and
animation package for the IBM PC platform. It employs scanline
rendering to achieve photo-realistic effects rather than
ray tracing. Because of this, it cannot do true shadows,
reflections or refractions, but can, in many cases, simulate them
accurately enough for most purposes. The package costs several
thousand dollars, even with an educational discount. There is a
newsgroup for discussions on this package.
news:comp.graphics.packages.3dstudio
* Alias
The newsgroup for this software is news:comp.graphics.apps.alias
* Lightwave
The newsgroup for this is news:comp.graphics.apps.lightwave
Note that there is also a group news:comp.graphics.rendering.misc
for the discussion of general rendering issues.
------------------------------
Subject: 2 - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Mailing Lists
------------------------------
Subject 2.1 - FTP and Web Sites
The following list details some of the main graphics related FTP
sites, their maintainers (where known) and any other info.
For a more complete list of FTP sites, see the list by Eric Haines
<er...@acm.org> and Nick Fotis <nfo...@theseas.ntua.gr> from which
much of the following has been taken.
* ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ [128.252.135.4]
George Kyriazis <kyri...@esd.sgi.com>
A huge repository of graphics stuff, particulary:
- /graphics/graphics - get CONTENTS file.
- /graphics/graphics/objects/TDDD - the TDDD objects/converters.
- /mirrors/unix-c/graphics - Rayshade, MTV, FBM, PBMPLUS, etc.
- /mirrors/msdos/graphics - DKB ray tracer, FLI RayTracker demos.
- /graphics/graphics/mirrors - mirrors many sites.
- /pub/rad.tar.Z - SGI_RAD.
- /graphics/graphics/radiosity - Radiance and Indian packages.
- /systems/ibmpc/msdos/graphics - loads of PC graphics stuff.
* ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/ [134.106.1.9]
Frank Neumann <Frank....@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
Another good site for ray tracing, particulary POV-Ray.
- /pub/pov-ray - get INDEX for full details
- /pub/pov-ray/conv - format converters
- /pub/pov-ray/edit - graphical editors
- /pub/pov-ray/ext - source extensions
- /pub/pov-ray/gen - data file generators
- /pub/pov-ray/misc - other tools, ray tracers, etc.
- /pub/pov-ray/new - uploads
- /pub/pov-ray/obj - objects
- /pub/pov-ray/pack - compression
- /pub/pov-ray/pix - pictures
- /pub/pov-ray/scen - scenes
- /pub/pov-ray/text - text articles
- /pub/pov-ray/view - viewers
- /pub/pov-ray/pbin - unofficial POV binaries
* ftp://ftp.povray.org/ [165.113.121.81]
http://www.povray.org/ [207.159.132.159]
Christopher Cason <Chris...@povray.org>
This is the primary site for POV-Ray. It contains a large
number of POV-Ray utilities, executables, and scenes. This site
has also grown to have a mirror of avalon.vislab.navy.mil (see
below), as well as polyray and rayshade.
- /pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame - incredible ray traced images
- /pub/povray/Official - official sources and executables
- /pub/povray/Ray-Tracing-News - archive of Eric Haines' newsletter
- /pub/povray/animation - animations created with POV-Ray
- /pub/povray/ezine - a magazine about POV-Ray
- /pub/povray/fonts - font utilities
- /pub/povray/modellers - CAD packages for creating scene files
- /pub/povray/objects - a collection of POV objects
- /pub/povray/scenes - complete POV-Ray scene files
- /pub/povray/unofficial - modifications and executables by others
- /pub/povray/utilities - tools and programs to make life easier
- /pub/competition - images from old ray tracing competition
- /pub/irtc - image from the new ray tracing competition
(note that the IRTC has its own site http://www.irtc.org/)
- /pub/mirrors/avalon - avalon.vislab.navy.mil mirror (See below)
- /pub/polyray - Polyray source files
Due to increasing demand for better access, ftp.povray.org now has
many mirror sites around the world. None of the mirrors are
"Official", so there is no guarantee that they will have everything
at povray.org, nor that it is the latest version. However, POV-Ray
is not a release-a-week piece of software, so chances are that the
local mirror will have the latest release. If anyone notices that
one of these sites no longer exists, please let me know.
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/mirrors/ [128.252.135.4]
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/mirrors/ [128.252.135.4]
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/povray/ [165.113.121.81]
ftp://ftp.vu.union.edu/pub/povray/ [149.106.37.186]
http://www.vu.union.edu/~ftp/pub/povray/ [149.106.37.186]
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/graphics/povray/ [128.174.5.14]
ftp://ftp.uwa.edu.au/ [130.95.128.1]
ftp://plaza.aarnet.edu.au/graphics/graphics/mirrors/ [139.130.23.2]
ftp://ftp.ncu.edu.tw/Packages/ray-tracing/ [140.115.1.71]
http://ftp.ncu.edu.tw/Packages/ray-tracing/ [140.115.1.71]
ftp://ring.asahi-net.or.jp/pub/misc/povray/ [202.224.39.15]
http://www.hensa.ac.uk/ftp/mirrors/povray/ [129.12.200.129]
ftp://www.hensa.ac.uk/ftp/mirrors/povray/ [129.12.200.129]
ftp://ftp.shu.ac.uk/pub/computing/packages/raytrace/ [143.52.20.24]
ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.povray.org/ [193.63.255.4]
ftp://ftp.fh-rosenheim.de/pub/mirror/ftp.povray.org/ [141.60.160.3]
ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/mirror/povray/ [139.174.2.10]
http://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/mirror/povray/ [139.174.2.10]
ftp://kermit.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/mirrors/povray/ [141.7.1.181]
http://kermit.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/povray/ [141.7.1.181]
ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/other/povray/ [131.188.3.2]
http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/other/povray/ [131.188.3.2]
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/graphics/raytracing/povray [128.130.34.160]
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/graphics/raytracing/povray/ [128.130.34.160]
ftp://stef.u-picardie.fr/pub2/ftp.povray.org/ [193.49.184.23]
http://stef.u-picardie.fr/ftp/pub2/ftp.povray.org/ [193.49.184.23]
ftp://ftp.univ-lille1.fr:/pub/povray/ [134.206.1.72]
ftp://ftp.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/raytrace/ [156.35.23.24]
http://www.etsimo.uniovi.es/ftp/pub/raytrace/ [156.35.23.24]
ftp://ftp.nectec.or.th/pub/mirrors/ray-tracing/ [192.150.251.33]
http://ftp.nectec.or.th/pub/mirrors/ray-tracing/ [192.150.251.33]
ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/povray/ [148.81.209.3]
http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/povray/ [148.81.209.3]
ftp://ftp.flashnet.it/pub/ftp.povray.org/ [194.247.160.5]
http://serviceftp.flashnet.it/mirrors.htm [194.247.160.5]
ftp://sunsite.wits.ac.za/pub/mirrors/ [146.141.15.214]
The POV-Ray CD-ROM from Walnut Creek Raytrace! is now available
online. Check it out at:
http://www.aussie.org/products/
* ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/ [128.112.128.1]
Craig Kolb <c...@cs.princeton.edu>
Home of Rayshade, and other graphics tid-bits.
- /pub/Graphics/GraphicsGems - source code from Graphics Gems books
- /pub/Graphics/URT - Utah Raster Toolkit
- /pub/Graphics/SPD - Standard Procedural Database
- /pub/Graphics/rayshade - rayshade source code
- /pub/Graphics/RTNews - Ray Tracing News
- /pub/Graphics/Papaers - ray tracing papers, bibliographies
* ftp://avalon.viewpoint.com/ [204.212.34.3]
http://avalon.viewpoint.com/ [204.212.34.10]
Webmaster <s...@viewpoint.com>
Avalon was created to be a 3D object "repository" for the net. 3D
objects (multiple formats), utilities, and file format documents
are only part of what is available here. Since July 1995, Avalon
has been run by Viewpoint, a commercial 3D model vendor, but they
insist that the Avalon models will still be available for free to
all. This site is also mirrored by (among others):
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/mirrors/avalon/
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/mirrors/avalon/
ftp://sunsite.wits.ac.za/pub/mirrors/ftp.povray.org/mirrors/avalon/
* ftp://hobbes.lbl.gov/ [128.3.12.38]
http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/HOME.html [128.3.12.33]
Greg Ward <gjw...@lbl.gov>
Official distribution site for Radiance ray trace/radiosity package.
* ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/ [18.70.0.209]
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/top.html
[164.107.8.52]
- /pub/usenet/news.answers - the land of FAQs.
------------------------------
Subject 2.2 - Mailing Lists
Listed below is a selection of mailing lists related to graphics
and/or ray tracing. If I haven't included specific details on
subscription, it's because I don't know. Best bet is to send a
"help" message.
* POV-Ray
Called the dkb-list for historical reasons (POV-Ray was based on
David Buck's "DKBTrace"), the list exists for users of POV-Ray and
associated products, on all platforms.
Subscription: listserv%TREARN...@vm.gmd.de
Body Text: subscribe dkb-l <Your full name>
Posting: DKB-L%TREARN...@listserv.gmd.de
* Rayshade
Mailing list for Rayshade users, mainly on Unix platforms.
Subscription: rayshade-us...@cs.princeton.edu
Posting: rayshad...@cs.princeton.edu
Archive: ftp://graphics.stanford.edu/pub/rayshade/rayshade-users/
* Radiance
Greg Ward, the author of Radiance has a distribution list of all
users. Register with him: gr...@pink.lbl.gov
* Imagine
For users of the Imagine 3d rendering and animation package for the
Amiga and, more recently, the IBM PC.
Subscription: list...@sjuvm.stjohns.edu
Body Text: subscribe imagine <first name> <last name>
Posting: ima...@sjuvm.stjohns.edu
* Toaster
This list deals with the Video Toaster system for the Amiga.
Subscription: toaster...@bobsbox.rent.com
Body Text: subscribe <address> toaster
Posting: toa...@bobsbox.rent.com
* Lightwave
Lightwave is part of the suite of programs that come with the
Video Toaster system for the Amiga.
Subscription: lightwav...@bobsbox.rent.com
Body Text: subscribe <address> lightwave
Posting: ligh...@bobsbox.rent.com
* TrueSpace
This is a mailing list for users of trueSpace, maintained by
employees of trueSpace's maker, Caligari (http://www.caligari.com).
Subscription: truespac...@caligari.com
Body Text: subscribe <address> truespace
Posting: true...@caligari.com
* 3D Studio
Autodesk's 3d modelling and rendering system for the IBM PC.
Subscription: 3dstudio...@bobsbox.rent.com
Body Text: subscribe <address> 3dstudio
Posting: 3dst...@bobsbox.rent.com
------------------------------
Subject: 3 - Modelling Software
------------------------------
Subject 3.1 - SCED
SCED is a constraint based scene editor written by Stephen Chenney
<sche...@franklin.cs.berkeley.edu>. Stephen also maintains a
mailing list for bug reports, patches, and early notification of new
releases.
Sced is a scene modeller for Unix and X. It runs on many Unix platforms,
including Linux. It is being distributed as source code. The latest
version is always available at:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~schenney/sced/sced.html
ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/stephen/sced/
An enhancement to SCED by Denis McLaughlin, called SCEDA, has all the
features of SCED, but also adds support for keyframed animation.
Animated objects have their position, rotation, and scale
interpolated smoothly across multiple keyframes via a (modified)
spline function. You can find out more about SCEDA at:
http://members.home.net/mbeast1/
Feature List:
* Cube, Cylinder, Cone, Plane, Sphere primitives.
* Full support for CSG, including CSG wireframes that look like CSG
objects.
* A constraint based editing interface, which supports the accurate
placement of object relative to other objects, and dynamic
constraint maintenance.
* Previewing using your favorite renderer.
* Arbitrary, dynamic view of the scene.
* Support for Radiance, RenderMan, POV-Ray, Rayshade, and VRML.
* Target renderer specific attributes - allowing the full range of
POV textures to be accessed, including the declaration of new
textures and the inclusion of files.
* Arbitrarily dense wireframes.
* A simple input file format.
* Support for arbitrary OFF format polygonal objects.
* Automatic compression and decompression of files.
* Spotlight and Area light sources.
* Removal of many restrictions on the editing of CSG objects,
including the ability to change the basic type of an object.
* Lots of bug fixes. This version is now very stable under Linux and
Solaris at least. The last very was regretably unstable.
* Lots of small improvements to things like previewing, selection,
handling of objects behind the eye and so on.
Tutorials are provided to introduce use of the interface.
The system has been tested on several platforms, and appears to be
easy to port to different systems. It REQUIRES X11 Release 5. Note
that POV 2.2 NEEDS TO BE PATCHED to use files created by SCED.
Binaries will soon be available for Linux and Solaris. Binaries for
other platforms are also desired.
Planned in the future:
* POV->Sced conversion program, for editing an old POV file.
* Bezier patch and arbitrary wireframe support.
------------------------------
Subject 3.2 - POVLAB
POVLAB is a freeware (open source) DOS based 3D graphic modeller
for POV-Ray 3.0 written by Denis Olivier <doli...@cyberstation.fr>.
Here are some of its features:
* 16/256 colors graphic SVGA/VESA 1.2.
* 387 protected mode, optimized for 486 and Pentium.
Virtual memory, up to 32 mb.
* 4 viewports (left, front, top and camera).
* Material & texture preview, library management, add your own.
* Real time camera, like 3D Studio does, including POV-Ray FOV.
* Lights: omni, spot, area/spot, cylinder (color, shadows, on/off).
* Deformation (matrix scale, translate and rotate based).
* User configuration (full ascii, very simple to modify).
* Selection (rotation, scale, translate, copy, ...).
* Normal/fast/boxed display, freezed and ignored objects.
* Raw objects, box, cone, cylinder, blob, disc, tube, torus, plane,
sphere, lathe, bezier patches, spline, automap, extruder,
superellipsoid...
* CSG (copy, merge, difference, union).
* Procedures (rotate and copy, translate and copy, align, extruder).
* Plugins: program your own external procedures/object generators
* Mesh precision control for height-fields and torus.
* Up to 20000 objects.
* Parameters: ior, refraction, ambient, phong, phong_size,
diffuse, crand, reflection, image, bump map...
* Create 3D fonts (read TrueType fonts).
* Image files viewer, best palette fitting (dithering, scaling and more).
* HSL and RGB color's dialog boxes.
* Formatted output with user's "soft" tabs (thanks Dan Farmer).
* Compiled with management for FDIV Pentium's error.
* Shell to your favorite viewer.
* Support a lot of new options in POV-Ray 3.0 as :
- Extended light sources (atmosphere, fading, ... ).
- Focal blur.
- Atmospheric effects and layered fog.
- Caustics, fade_distance, fade_power.
- Adding blobs for spheres and cylinders.
- Adding hollow keyword.
- Added cylindrical lights.
- Support superellipsoids.
- Support radiosity.
* Support rendering in WINPOV.
* B-Spline path with CTDS like connections.
* Debugging infos an files.
* View POV scene code with lights, cameras and objects manual editing.
* Smooth key vertices on the spline.
* OS/2 setup files.
* Support online, patches, helpers, faq, mailing list,
illustrated tutorial, scenes, objects.
System requirements for POVLAB are floating point unit (387/487SX
or 486/P5/P6), 8MB RAM (up to 32 MB virtual memory), 30MB disk space,
mouse, and 16/256 color SVGA/VESA 1.2. It also works under OS/2 and
Win95, and supports rendering with WinPOV.
POVLAB images, tips, faq, plug-ins and more are available at:
http://www.povlab.org/
Dennis Olivier has stopped all development on POVLAB. However,
currently a small group of enthousiasts is reworking POVLAB to a
multi-platform version. Their ongoing work can be followed at:
http://pdelagrange.free.fr/labdev/
------------------------------
Subject 3.3 - MORAY
MORAY, by Lutz and Kretzschmar, is a shareware modeller for PC's that
directly supports POV-Ray 3.1 primitives and more. Registration is
required after a trial period. Support is available via email and the
POV-Ray news server news.povray.org.
MORAY is a program with which you can design scenes for the POV-Ray
raytracer to render. Contrary to normal scene design, with MORAY you
design the scenes graphically. Up to now it was pretty difficult to
imagine what the scene looked like, without laying it out on graph
paper, or doing many test renders. MORAY is like a graph paper, it
lets you place and change objects in wireframe while you see them.
MORAY then generates the text file that POV needs to read.
MORAY can thus also be used as a rapid prototype tool, to place
objects quickly and write the scene file. You can then edit scene
files to suit your needs, just like you have been doing up to now.
MORAY stores and works with POV-Ray primitives, as opposed to normal
CAD systems, which mostly convert all objects to triangle meshes or
similar polygon based formats when outputting. This ensures optimum
performance and image quality from the raytracer.
The emphasis in designing MORAY was to be able to work as easily and
as graphically as possible. Most of the work can be done with the
mouse.
Three 2D views and a 3D view of your scene are visible on screen.
You can perform all transformations of the objects in the 2D views
with the mouse. The 3D view shows what the current camera will see,
i.e. how POV will raytrace it. MORAY allows you to:
* scale, rotate and translate an object interactively
* define cameras with which to view your scene
* view the scene in wire frame as POV-Ray will raytrace it
* specify the wire-frame complexity of on screen objects
* graphically place a bounding box around an object
* automatically create bounding boxes of any objects
* make nested CSG or composite objects
* define new textures from within MORAY
* place imagemaps interactively on objects
* manipulate the control points of a bezier patch to create shapes
not easily created otherwise
* create bezier patch meshes
* create rotational, translational and tapering sweeps that are
output as smooth triangles
* copy complex nested objects
* create multiple copies of objects, transforming each independently
* specify a region of the 3D view to render
* call POV-Ray from within MORAY to render scenes
* A complete 100% Texture Editor for POV-Ray with Preview.
* Fewer redraws that are interruptible.
* Right-Mouse-button support.
* New Objects (Blobs, RAW triangles, User-defined objects).
* Shallow and deep copies.
* CSG evaluation.
* Actual Heightfield display (for TGA).
* Manipulations in 3D views.
* Spotlight views.
* Multi-level Undo for major scene operations.
The latest version of MORAY for Windows V3.1 (Build 4325) offers these
improvements:
* Full support for POV-Ray 3.1 texturing, including interior and media.
* Automatic, seamless support for POV-Ray For Windows.
* Material Library support.
* Inverse Kinematics.
* Local coordinates (pivot points).
* Online Helpsystem.
* Plugin SDK to allow access to the scene data. Supports import/export
filters, custom objects, and MORAY interface access.
MORAY V3.1 runs under Windows 95/98/NT and requires POV-Ray 3.1 or later.
It is recommended to have at least 32MB and a truecolor desktop.
For the latest information and pricing, please visit our website at
http://www.stmuc.com/moray.
------------------------------
Subject 3.4 - GUM
GUM is a solid and surface modeller that currently supports POV,
Polyray and Rayce and runs in MS-Windows. The author is Lex van der
Sluijs <IO77...@student.io.tudelft.nl>.
GUM is DemoWare: the demo is yours and you have NO obligation to
register whatsoever, but there is a limitation: only 50 objects can
be saved. The registered version naturally has no such limitation.
GUM stands for 'Grand Unified Modeller' which means two things:
* It will never be done.
* The fact that its internal data structure can accomodate all major
object types, that is solids (implicit, b-rep), surfaces
(parametric and polyhedral) and wireframe objects. (and yes, a
layout of its C++ class hierarchy takes many pages).
The current version can be found at:
ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/mirror/povray/povray/utilities/modellers/gum
CAD BBS Holland (+31-3402-90287) where it is a free file
CompuServe, in the GRAPHDEV forum, thanks to Harry Rowe
I won't list the list of supported objects here since that would
become a bit long. Instead, some highlights:
* CSG evaluation, (wireframe representation of CSG Differences)
* 3D direct manipulation: 3D handles on objects like on the SGI
* support for trimmed surfaces (trimmed with a solid, that is)
Polyray can render these.
* real-time pan and zoom (non-real-time also possible)
* several renderers can be supported at once
* relatively advanced texture- (and other types of declaration)
handling, resulting in self-contained scene-files.
* heightfield reading for Targa files: see what you're doing
* Custom objects for external/not-yet-supported/huge objects
* support for 'extra special' features via the Header dialog (timer
variables, directional & textured lights, etc)
* the ability to find all used files used in the scene
* a robust RAW file reader
* Object library feature: use objects from other GUM scenes
* flexible FastDraw: Full, Skip(variable), Bounding Box. Static,
during viewport change/object dragging (multiple-viewport too)
* Automatic starting of the specified renderer, automatic starting of
your favourite imageviewer when the image is done
Some 'lowlights' (all of which will -naturally- be addressed):
* cumbersome installation procedure
* lack of sweeps
* lack of blobs
* cylinders, cones and paraboloids must be capped manually by
intersecting them with discs
System requirements: 386+387 @ 40 MHz with 4 Mb RAM. An 800x600
display is highly recommended, although 640x480 can be used. GUM plus
one renderer takes about 6 Mb on your harddisk.
Here are some frequently asked questions and their answers about GUM,
but first there are two things that should be brought to your
attention:
* there's already a FAQ in the manual, see the Contents topic. The
Q&A's here have popped up after the release of the program.
* most questions about usage of the program can be eliminated if you
do the Quick Start, also in GUM's help-file.
Q: I get a list of warnings every time I try to render or save
something, saying that some 'pages' could not be found. However,
all these 'pages' are POV/Polyray/Rayce keywords, such as
'marble', 'green' and 'diffuse'.
A: You need to move GUM.INI from GUM's directory to your WINDOWS
directory. If it's not there, extract a fresh GUM.INI from
GUM091EX.ZIP. In it are the keywords that have special meaning to
programs like POV, and without the file GUM can't discern between
references to other definitions (like using the normal 'Bumpy' in
'BumpyGlass') and keywords (such as 'red' and 'ior').
Q: When I try to start the program I get an error message saying that
CTL3DV2.DLL is not correctly installed.
A: More than one copy of this DLL could be found by MS-Windows, which
is not allowed for this particular file, hence the cryptic error
message. You should find the most recent copy of it on your system,
move it to WINDOWS\SYSTEM and delete all others.
------------------------------
Subject 3.5 - Breeze Designer
Breeze Designer is a freeware 32-bit 3D modelling and design tool
written by John Neville <nev...@imagos.dialix.oz.au> for MS-Windows
(NT, 95, Win32s). It has been written to primarily interface with
the Persistance of Vision raytracer (POV-Ray version 2.0 & 3.0),
there is also support to export to a number of other popular
renderers including Pixars's RenderMan. Some of its features
include:
* Modelling primitives; cube, sphere, cone, cylinder, torus,
bicubic "Bezier" patches
* Text objects using TrueType fonts
* Heightfields, spline paths and extruded shapes
* Iso-surfaces; blobs (metaballs).
* Surfaces of revolution (sweeps).
* Built-in texture builder and shaded preview.
* Object grouping with CSG support.
* Keyframe animation support, with tween function and spline paths.
* Import Autodesk 3D-Studio(TM) 3DS and AutoCAD DXF format models.
* Export POV-Ray, RenderMan RIB, VRML scene, Polyray, AutoCAD DXF.
* Built-in macro language and third party plug-in module support.
* Support for OpenGL with texture mapping for Windows NT/95
* Support for the Intel(R) 3DR rendering library.
* On-line help & tool tips support.
Breeze is available for download at:
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/utilities/modellers/breeze/
------------------------------
Subject 3.6 - Other Modellers
* AC3D
AC3D, by Andy Colebourne <an...@comp.lancs.ac.uk>, is reportedly
a very easy to use 3D object/scene modeller currently available
for SGI, SUN, Linux, and MS Windows platforms. It outputs POV,
Renderman, VRML, Dive, and Massive files. The Linux, Windows,
and SGI binaries are shareware, while the SUN version is free.
Source code is not available. More details, manual, and binary
downloads are available at:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/andy/ac3d.html
* Blob Sculptor
Blob Sculptor, by Alfonso Hermida, Steve Anger and Truman Brown
allows you to model shapes using blob primitives. Output is to
RAW, DXF, BLB (internal format), POV, Polyray, Rayshade and CTDS.
In addition, the MS-Windows version, ported by Ronal Praver,
supports NFF, VideoScape and others.
Markus Kniebes
Last-modified: 2001/02/28
Posting-Frequency: every 30 days
This is part 2 of the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing Frequently
Asked Questions list. The latest version of the FAQ is available via
anonymous WWW at:
http://www.cyrus.ruhr.de/rayfaq/
It is also available via anonymous ftp at:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/
If you only have email, you can get it by sending email to:
with both
"send usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/part1" and
"send usenet/news.answers/graphics/raytrace-faq/part2"
in the body of the message (without the quotes).
(C) Copyright 1994 Andy Wardley <a...@peritas.demon.co.uk>
(C) Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997 Andreas Dilger <adi...@enel.ucalgary.ca>
(C) Copyright 2000 Markus Kniebes <kni...@localhost.ruhr.de>
------------------------------
Subject: 4 - Utilities and Other Software
------------------------------
Subject 4.1 - Image Display/Conversion Programs
* IMAGEMAGICK - An X-Windows based image display program (source
distribution), that also allows simple editing of images, such as
color modification, scaling, rotating, text annotation, etc. PNG
format images are now supported by ImageMagick. Available at:
ftp://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/imagemagick.tar.gz
http://www.imagemagick.org
(Cristy, 1995)
* NEOPAINT - A useful DOS shareware paint package (registration US
$45) for creating images, height fields, etc, or just touching up
finished artwork. Available from wuarchive and mirrors.
* NETPBM - A collection of command-line utilities for most platforms
(source distribution). Executables available for most other
platforms like DOS, OS/2, Linux, and others. NetPBM utilities
convert practically any format to any other by using a common
intermediate file format, as well as allowing quantization,
cropping, combining, blur, and many other effects. Available at:
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/NetPBM/
(Poskanzer et al., 1991-1994)
* PICLAB - An excellent package for converting and post-processing
images for DOS. (Crocker, 1990)
* QPV - The Quick Picture Viewer. A great utility for displaying and
converting images for DOS/Win systems. Formerly QPEG, QPV has been
improved, and has new features, such as the ability to read and
write PNG format images. (Fromme, 1995)
* XV - An X-Windows image display program (source distribution),
with simple image editing facilities, such as color editing,
scaling, rotation, and also filter effects for blurring, edge
detection, and others. A patch is available for XV 3.10 to support
PNG images via libpng and libz. (Bradley, 1995)
http://www.trilon.com/xv/
------------------------------
Subject 4.2 - Format Conversion Utilities
Much of the following sections area taken from Amanda Osbourne's
<a...@northshore.ecosoft.com> "Raytrace Utilities for DOS/Windows"
list. All are IBM PC based unless otherwise specified.
Various utilities for converting from one 3D file format to another:
* 3DSPOV - Reads 3d studio mesh files. Writes out to Raw, POV-Ray
(1 & 2), Vivid and Polyray. (Anger & Bowermaster, 1993)
* 3DS2POV V1.80 - This free program can convert your binary 3D Studio
3DS file in POV 1.0, POV 2.0 including basic material parameters
(color, ambient, diffuse, reflection, transparency) and smoothing.
It also supports the output of RAW (useful for POVLAB), Vivid and
Polyray. Supports animation ! BySteve Anger
http://www.uni-jena.de/~p6sepa/software.htm
* 3DWin - Likely the most versitle shareware 3D conversion
utility that you will find anywhere. It is actively maintained and
developed and has support for most major 3D file formats. It also
include direct support for POV-Ray and Moray plus the author has
plug-ins available for Moray for direct import capabilitites.
http://www.stmuc.com/thbaier/
* DEM2POV - This program (source distribution) converts US Geological
Survey (USGS) Digital Elevation Maps (DEM) to the TGA format
heightfields used by POV-Ray 2.2. Includes a large DEM file of the
region around the Grand Canyon. (Kirby, 1995)
* DXF2POV - DXF to POV-Ray 1 conversion program.
(Collins, Wells, Farmer & Gibeson, 1992)
* DXF2RAW - DXF to Raw conversion program.
(Coy, Barber, Daigle & Shiffman, 1992)
* DXF2V - DXF to Vivid conversion program.
(Coy, Barber, Daigle & Shiffman, 1992)
* DXF3DS - DXF to 3DS conversion program. (Yost/Autodesk, 1991)
* HUTIL101c - A set of utilities (source) for converting between
various POV-Ray heightfield formats (16-bit TGA, GIF, POT) as well
as OCT and Matlab 32-bit MAT files. In addition, it can combine
heightfields using arithmetic operators, join them together, scale,
and create spherical and cylindrical heightfields with triangle
meshes. See also HF-Lab. (Beale, 1995)
* IV2RAY - Converts SGI OpenInventor 2.0 (VRML 1.0) files to RayShade
files. Freely available from Cow House Productions web page at:
http://www.cowhouse.com/. (Cow House Productions, 1996)
* MRYPLY - Converts Moray files to PolyRay files.
* OBJ2ASC2 - Wavefront object to 3d studio ascii converter.
(Knight, 1993)
* RAW2PV - Excellent utility that allows the user to adjust the
level of smoothing to apply to raw data as it is translated to
POV-Ray (1 & 2.x), Polyray or Vivid 2. It can also add a camera
and light to the scene, making things fairly easy for the novice
user. (Anger, 1993)
* RAYL210 - Helpful utility to convert uLathe (an object creator
program for windows) files to RAW, POV-Ray 1 & 2.x or Vivid 2
format. (Koehler, 1993)
* SPD - The Standard Procedural Database isn't a conversion package,
per-se, but rather a set of tools for storing objects in a
platform netutral format. It can convert from NFF, simple DXF, and
Wavefront OBJ to a multitude of formats (about 14 at last count).
It is often used by ray tracing researchers for measuring ray
tracer speeds. http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/SPD/overview.html
* TDDD2ASC - TDDD (Imagine) to 3D studio ascii file converter.
(Knight, 1993)
* WCVT2POV - Although wcvt2pov (MS-Windows) started out converting 3D file
formats to POV-Ray, wcvt2pov has become a generic 3D file format conversion
utility, with support for importing 3d studio, Wavefront, NFF, DXF, TrueType
Fonts, RAW triangles and some other formats, and exporting 3ds, asc, POV-Ray,
NFF, DXF, VRML, Wavefront, Open GL 'C' code fragments, RAW triangles, and some
other formats. http://www.europa.com/~keithr/ (Rule, 1995)
* Blender Python Conversion Scripts - Python scripts for converting
Blender models to other formats including POV-Ray.
http://www.q-bus.de/Blender/
------------------------------
Subject 4.3 - Creation Creators
Utilities to aid in the creation of ray tacing objects:
* BOXER - Object generator for POV-Ray 1 (makes things like bathroom
tiles and such based upon user input). (Miller, 1993)
* BRANCH - Tree creator for POV-Ray 1. (Weller, 1992)
* CHAIN - Generates interlocking chain links for POV-Ray 1.0.
(Koehler, 1992)
* CM - CircleMaster utility for working with quadric spheres and
ellipsoids; writes output to POV-Ray 1.0. (Brown, 1992)
* COIL - Creates coiled objects for POV-Ray 1.0. (Kirby, 1992)
* COILV - Creates coiled objects for Vivid 2. (Kirby & Cox, 1992)
* CTDS - Connects a series of xyz dot coordinates. Though this may
not sound like much, this is an extremely helpful utility.
Supports POV-Ray, Vivid and Polyray. (Brown, 1993)
* FORM - All sorts of shapes can be generated with this program.
Form files consist of both shapes and commands (like twistx and
bend) and output may be POV-Ray 1, 2 or .plg. Interesting program,
complementary to LPARSER. (Rowbottom, 1993)
* FRACTINT - The ultimate fractals generator for DOS, X-windows
source code, and distributed with the Linux Slackware games disks.
Great for creating height fields, colour maps, viewing gifs or just
creating fractals. (The Stone Soup Group, 1990-95)
* FRGEN - Fractal Landscape (and other shapes too) Generator.
Though the program supports Vivid and POV-Ray 1 & 2 directly, by
selecting raw output you can smooth triangles out with RAW2POV to
create nice hills and dales. (Anger, 1993)
* GEODOME - Utility for generating geodesic domes. Output to
POV-Ray 2.x format as either facets or a mesh of pipes and joints.
IBM PC executable, with source included. (Wardley, 1994)
* GFORGE - Graphical Fractal Forgery (source, DOS exe). Generates
16-bit heightfields for POV-Ray, using a high-quality algorithm:
the IFFT of 1/f noise. File formats include PGM, PNG, POV TGA
heightfield, and Matlab bin. Several parameters give you control
over the appearance of the output, which can range from sand to
hills to mountains. Useful also for 2D textures; the image always
tiles perfectly. Now also supports craters. (Beale, 1995)
* HFLAB - Heightfield Lab (DOS/Unix source, DOS exe). Generates and
manipulates 16-bit heightfields for POV-Ray, using a variety of
mathematical and procedural algorithms. Has a graphical interface
for both DOS and X Windows. Allows the combination of two or more
heightfields by addition, multiplication, or side-by-side joining,
and many other operators. File formats include PGM, PNG, POV TGA
heightfield, and Matlab 32-bit floating point. (Beale, 1996).
* LEVCON - Level Connector. This takes an input image in PGM format
and does mathematical "smoothing" on the data to generate smoothly
varying surfaces. The input image tells LEVCON which levels are to
stay at their given height and which ones can change, and you tell
LEVCON how to go about connecting the fixed levels. See the classic
image "kkteaset.jpg" at the povray.org Hall Of Fame to get an idea
of what LEVCON can do (it made the tiles). (Kivisalo, 1995)
* LEVELLER - A heightfield/terrain object modeller/editor for
Windows 95/98/NT. Strengths are ease of use, intuitive realtime
navigation, visualization and editing, and strong POV-Ray support.
Demos and beta versions are free; registered versions cost below
$40 US. Available at http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/
* LPARSER - L-system creator and mutator. This program is
particularly strong in the creation of organic looking forms. Many
example data files are included with the program. The language of
l-systems is not intuitive but the results can be truly stunning.
Outputs to DXF (both R12 and 3D faces), POV-Ray 2.x, RAW and
Renderstar VOL. A wire-frame viewer that reads .3DS, .RAW,
Fractint .RAY, ARE-24 .POL and Lparser/Renderstar .VOL files is
included. (Lapre, 1993)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljlapre/lparser.htm
* LV20POVID - Newer and more powerful than LV2POV, this program
reads an lviewer info file and generates data files in POV-Ray
(1 & 2.x) and Vivid formats. The program's main strength lies in
landscape generation. (van der Mark, 1993)
* TRMK - Terrain Maker (DOS) uses a triangle midpoint subdivision
algorithm to generate a variety of GIF heightfields.
(Jorgensen, 1995)
* PLANT - Fractal plant generator. Outputs supported are POV-Ray
(1 & 2), Polyray and CTDS (Connect the dots smoother).
(Bryerton, 1993)
* SUDS - Random positioning of lots of spheres (or other objects)
based on a variety of selections. (Farmer, Wegner & Schwan, 1994)
* TORPATCH - This program creates a rope/wire object that passes
smoothly through supplied points out of a series of clipped tori.
Available as DOS EXE, and Turbo Pascal or C source. Can also
create a random tangle of wires. (Mackey & Beddes, 1996)
* TWISTER - Utility that will create spirals, coils, etc., of
blobs, cubes or sphere. IBM PC executable with source, output to
POV 2.x format. (Wardley, 1994)
------------------------------
Subject 4.4 - Texture Editors
* CMAP - Interactive color map creator for POV-Ray.
(Lutz & Kretzschmar, 1993)
* TCE - The color editor for POV-Ray 1. (Farmer, 1991)
* TCEV - The color editor for Vivid. (Farmer, 1991)
* TEXMAKE - Early version of a utility to assist in texture
creation in POV-Ray 2.x. (Sigler, 1993)
* TXMAG - Texture Magic is an interactive, 32-bit MS-Windows based
texture editor for POV-Ray 2.x, Assymetrix 3D F/X, and Autodesk
3D-Studio.
http://private.homepages.intershop.de/rene/povray/tex_mag.html (Pultz, 1996)
------------------------------
Subject 4.5 - Animation
* AERO - AERO is a X-Windows based physical simulation environment
suitable for making complex, realistic animations. Objects
(including the camera) can be given properties like mass,
velocity, and acceleration, constraints like springs and dampers
can be specified between objects, and then AERO performs
collision detection, position, and orientation calculations.
Output is to POV-Ray 1.0 or 2.x scene files.
(Keller, Stolz, Ziegler, Braunl, 1995)
* AWKANI - AWK script to output POV-Ray animation data.
(Farmer, 1992)
* DTA - Dave's Targa Animator (DOS) converts .PNG, .TGA and many
other single image format frames into .FLI's and .FLC's and
back again. It can also do useful things like finding the best
256-color palette for a whole series of images. (Mason, 1995)
* MPEG_ENCODE - MPEG_ENCODE (source distribution, also many
executables) can take images in PPM and JPEG formats (as well
as other formats, if a ...toppm converter exists) to produce
a fully compliant MPEG 1 animation. It is possible to run
the encoding on multiple processors. It is available in many
locations (see 2 - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Mailing Lists)
(Rowe, et al, 1995)
* MPEG_PLAY - MPEG_PLAY (source distribution, also many executables)
displays MPEG 1 encoded animations on a large variety of systems.
(Rowe, et al, 1995)
* PPP - The POV and PolyRay Preprocessor allows scene files to be
created with conditional statements, loops, math functions,
vector math, and more to generate one or more scene files for
animation and complex object creation. (Wind, 1995)
* PVQUAN - PVQUAN (source) is a set of tools that allow you to create
.FLI creations on many platforms including Unix and DOS. Source
code is provided and includes a hosts of useful functions like
quantisation, .GIF read, display, etc.
* RAYSCENE - Set of animation utilities, not raytracer specific.
(Jarik & Hassi, 1991)
* RTAG - Ray Tracing Animation Generator (not raytracer specific).
A powerful program with its own language which supports, amongst
other things, spline path generation. (Sherrod, 1993)
* SCEDA - SCEDA is a descendant of the SCED X-Windows modeller,
with enhancements to allow generation of multiple scene files
for an animation. (See also 3 - Modelling Software)
(McLaughlin & Chenney, 1996)
* SP - Spline paths for animations. Many output formats (POV-Ray,
Vivid, Polyray, 3DV, Wire 3D) and acceleration and deceleration
are supported as well. (Mason, 1992)
* ZOOM - Interpolates steps between two positions for POV-Ray 1.0.
(Brown, 1993)
------------------------------
Subject 4.6 - Miscellaneous Utilities
* POVMODE.EL - Emacs mode to handle POV-Ray syntax. Available at:
http://www.acc.umu.se/~woormie/povray/index.html
------------------------------
Subject: 5 - Further Information and Resources
------------------------------
Subject 5.1 - On-line Resources
* FAQs
All of the FAQs in the USENET heirarchy that are posted to the
news.answers newsgroup (as all FAQs should be) are archived at:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/
They are also converted to HTML format and made available at:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/top.html
The POV-Ray specific FAQ as available at:
http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/povVFAQ/
For those people that are interested in learning about the internal
workings of a ray tracer, you should take a look at the newsgroup
comp.graphics.algorithms Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). This
document describes rotations, intersections, texture mapping, etc.
* Ray Tracing News
Eric Haines <er...@acm.org> has put together a phenomenal amount of
information on ray tracing. This he combines into his Ray Tracing
News (RTNews). They are a wealth of information and contain
articles, sofware reviews and comparisons, book reviews and lists
of everything and anything to do with ray tracing. They are
available from many sites in text and/or HTML format; the master
site is:
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/RTNews/html/
* Ray Tracing Bibliogaphies
In addidtion to the Ray Tracing News, Eric Haines also maintains an
up-to-date bibliography of papers relating to ray tracing:
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/bib/
Rick Speer <sp...@crl.com> has also done a lot of work in bringing
together articles on ray tracing. He maintains a cross-indexed ray
tracing bibliography of over 500 articles from 1968 to 1991.
These include papers from Siggraph, Graphics Interface,
Eurographics, CG International and Ausgraph proceedings. All
citations are keyworded and cross-indices are supplied by author
and keyword.
The bibliography is in the form of a 41 page postscript file which
is held at many ftp sites as "speer.raytrace.bib.ps.Z":
ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/papers/graphics/
* Ray Tracing Abstracts
Tom Wilson <wil...@cs.ucf.edu> has collected over 300 abstracts
from ray tracing related papers and books. The collections is
available as plain ascii, with Latex and troff formatting programs
included. It is available as "rtabs.*" from many sites.
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/bib/
* Graphics Resources List
The Graphics Resources List contains a wealth of information on all
sorts of computer graphics and visualization information. It has
info on mailing lists, plotting packages, ray tracers, other
rendering methods, etc. It is available on comp.graphics,
comp.answers or archived at various sites. The official archive is
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part1
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part2
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part3
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part4
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part5
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/part6
* Paper Bank Project
Juhana Kouhia <jk8...@cs.tut.fi> has collected together various
technical papers in electronic form. Contact him for more
information.
* Global Illumination Compendium
Phili Dutres effort to bring together most of the useful formulas and
equations for global illumination algorithms in computer graphics.
http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~phil/GI/
------------------------------
Subject 5.2 - Other Newsgroups
Other newsgroups that may be of interest to you are listed below.
- comp.graphics.algorithms
- comp.graphics.animation
- comp.graphics.apps.alias
- comp.graphics.apps.lightwave
- comp.graphics.apps.softimage
- comp.graphics.apps.wavefront
- comp.graphics.misc
- comp.graphics.packages.3dstudio
- comp.graphics.rendering.misc
- comp.graphics.rendering.renderman
- comp.graphics.visualization
------------------------------
Subject 5.3 - Books
Title: Ray Tracing Creations
Authors: Drew Wells and Chris Young
Publisher: The Waite Group
Year: 1993
ISBN: 1-878739-27-1
This book has been written by Drew Wells and Chris Young, two of the
original developers of POV-Ray, as a user and reference manual for
POV-Ray. Coming in at 573 pages, it's an excellent publication with
literally hundreds of stunning colour and monochrome pictures. The
only drawback with the book is that it deals with POV-Ray version 1.0
which is dated now that version 3.0 is out, but it is still a very
worthwhile investment for any POV-Ray user.
Title: Ray Tracing Worlds with POV-Ray
Authors: Alexander Enzmann, Lutz Kretzschmar, and Chris Young
Publisher: The Waite Group
Year: 1994
ISBN: 1-878739-64-6
Raytracing Worlds with POV-Ray is written with the intermediate to
advanced POV-Ray user in mind. This book comes with POV-Ray 2.2,
Moray, and several additional tools for MS-DOS on diskette. It
assumes you have a basic knowledge of POV-Ray, which you can easily
get by reading the POV-Ray documentation. An review of the book is
available at:
http://www.povray.org/povzine/povzine1/raytrace.html
Title: Adventures in Ray Tracing
Author: Alfonso Hermida
Publisher: Que Corp.
Year: 1993
ISBN: 1-56529-555-2
This book looks at Alexander Enzmann's ray tracer, Polyray
(see 1 - Ray Tracing Software), and the author's own modelling system,
POVCAD which runs under MS Windows. The two work well together. The
content of the book is good and, as in the previous book, there are
many excellent illustrations and pictures.
There are a few errors in the book, but Alfonso has produced an
errata list which is available from:
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/books/erratas/
Title: Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C
Authors: Christopher Watkins, Stephen Coy, Mark Finlay
Publisher: M&T Books
Year: 1992
ISBN: 1-55851-247-0
Provided with this book is source code for a ray tracer called Bob
which is a subset of Stephen Coy's full-blown ray tracer, Vivid
(see 1 - Ray Tracing Software).
Title: Making Movies on Your PC
Authors: David K. Mason and Alexander Enzmann
Publisher: The Waite Group
Year: 1993
ISBN: 1-878739-41-7
Focusing on animation, this book is by David K. Mason, author of many
utilities including DTA - Dave's Targa Animator, and Alexander
Enzmann, author of Polyray. These tools, and others, are used to show
how animations can be created on a PC. It's a 210 page book that is
laid out well with ample illustrations.
Title: An Introduction to Ray Tracing
Authors: Andrew Glassner (ed)
Publisher: Academic Press
Year: 1989
ISBN: 1-12-286160-4
An Introduction to Ray Tracing has its main focus on the programming
techniques, implementation, and theoretical concepts in writing a ray
tracer. It has been described as one of the two required books for
ray tracing programmers (the other being Object-Oriented Ray Tracing
in C++ by Nicholas Wilt) . It contains chapters from many of the
pioneers of ray tracing. Eratta is available at:
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/books/erratas/IntroToRT
Title: Graphics Gems
Author: Andrew Glassner (ed)
Publisher: Academic Press
Year: 1990
ISBN: 0122861663
Graphics Gems is a series of technical books devoted to computer
graphics algorithms, with editors from the who's-who of computer
graphics. While not specific to ray tracing, these books do contain
a lot of optimized ray tracing algorithms and code. The books are
very worthwhile to get if you are a graphics programmer (great covers
too)! You can get the source code examples for all volumes at:
http://www.acm.org/tog/GraphicsGems/
Title: Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++
Author: Nicholas Wilt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Year: 1993
ISBN: 0471-304-158
This book takes the reader through many issues involved with the
development of a ray tracer in C++. The last section of the book
deals with OORT, a class library for ray tracing. It does not
implement any input language or user interface but uses C++ calls to
the library. This is intuitive, due to the nature of C++, and
extremely powerful as all the normal constructs of C/C++ such as
loops, conditionals, etc., are available.
It's definately a programmer's book and some knowledge of graphics
programming is assumed. Because of this, the nature of the book is
quite technical and can be hard going. Eric Haines sums it up well:
------------------------------
Subject 5.4 - Image Libraries
The POV-Ray home site has a good collection of ray traced images.
The site maintains a "Hall of Fame" for outstanding images created
with POV-Ray:
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame/
http://www.povray.org/hof/
The Rayshade home page also has an amazing collection of images made
with this renderer and some custom additions at:
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~cek/rayshade/gallery/gallery.html
------------------------------
Subject 5.5 - Texture Libraries
There are a couple of initiatives under way to create a database of
POV-Ray textures. People who have any textures at all from POV-Ray
are encouraged to send textures to the maintainers of the archives
so that everyone can benefit from the time you spent on creating the
textures. A searchable index maintained by Rene Schwietzke is
available at:
http://texlib.povray.org/
There is a library of building related textures (bricks, stone, etc),
for use as image maps at:
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/packages/architec/Textures/
Other Resources
http://www.elektrobar.com/lux/textures.html
http://gasa.dcea.fct.unl.pt/carita/textures.html
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/textures/aindex.html
------------------------------
Subject 5.6 - Internet Ray Tracing Competition
Starting in November 1994, Matt Kruse started a raytracing
competition for the readers of c.g.r.r, and the internet in general.
What started out small grew into a great forum for incredible
raytraced images on the net. Open to all artists using raytracing as
their medium, the competition attracted artists of all skill levels,
but more importantly served as a showcase of what is possible, and
allowed everyone to learn a few tricks and techniques. Winners
invariably pushed the envelope of what people thought possible, and
winning was important as much for the admiration of the other artists
as it was for the prizes.
Because of its popularity, Matt could not keep up with the work
needed to run the competition to his satisfaction, and the contest
closed one year after it started. Fortunately, a new group of
people, Bill Marrs, Chip Richards, and Michael J Hammel, collectively
known as the IRTC Admin Team, have picked up the flame with the
blessing of Matt, and the new Internet Ray Tracing Competition has
begun. You can find out more about the competition, and see the
images as each competition finishes at:
http://www.irtc.org/ [204.140.166.85]
ftp://ftp.irtc.org/ [204.140.166.85]
ftp://ftp.lorax.ml.org/pub/irtc/ [128.2.97.15]
http://38.153.3.18/IRTC/
ftp://38.153.3.18/IRTC/
This competition is something to look forward to every other
month as the pictures become available for viewing. There have been
spectacular images for the first year of competitions. The complete
set of submitted images, as well as many of the source files are now
available on CD-ROM. See http://www.aussie.org/products/ for more
details.
------------------------------
Subject: 6 - Frequently Asked Questions
Now that you've been blasted with lists of FTP sites, utilitites,
software, books, etc., etc., the only questions you could possibly have
left to ask are those that...erm...aren't about FTP sites, utilities,
software or books, I suppose. So this section attempts to answer all
the other questions that don't fit in above.
------------------------------
Subject 6.1 - "Can I post binaries/images to this group?"
In a word, NO. The group is part of the comp.graphics hierarchy
which should be, and is, strictly non-binary. The reason for this is
that uuencoded binaries tend to be very large. By restricting binary
postings to the comp.binaries and alt.binaries hierachies, those
sites who do not want to carry large volume groups can easily ignore
anything under these two streams.
Remember that most sites pay to transfer and store news and if they
find that comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing is getting too
expensive, they can just stop carrying it. That is their right and
priviledge. Also remember that many individuals download this group
via modems and pay for every byte. They tend to get a bit annoyed
when they have to fork out lots of money to download stuff they might
not even want.
But what if you're really desperate to share with us your latest ray
tracing you've done depicting a mutant star camel exploding in a
super nova while naked dancers melt into a checkered floor? (The
checkered floor always turns up sooner or later). Great! I'm sure
we'd love to see it, you should post it to
news:alt.binaries.comp-graphics or news:alt.binaries.pictures.misc.
If you're posting it (obviously not to c.g.r.r), you should remember
to uuencode it and split it into small (less than 64k) parts. Make
sure to use an informative title like:
RAY TRACING: MUTANT.GIF: mutant star camel scene, part 1 of 6
and include a text posting (part 0 of n) that describes the picture,
states what format it's in (.gif, .jpg, etc.), what size it is, how
many colours, and anything else you want to mention. The more you
put, the better.
You can then post to news:comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, along
with a few lines saying "I've just posted this image to
alt.binaries.pictures.misc". By the way, ray tracing pictures
generally get a good response over in a.b.p.m and you'll often see
request for them in news:alt.binaries.pictures.d (discussion group).
The other alternative is to upload the picture or utility to an ftp
site and use comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing to announce it in
the same way.
------------------------------
Subject 6.2 - "Where can I find model data for..."
The former Avalon site has been closed down, and the Avalon model
site has been moved to Viewpoint, a commercial model vendor, as of
07/95. It is the promise of Viewpoint that the Avalon data remain
freely available to all. Avalon is now located at:
ftp://avalon.viewpoint.com/avalon/ or
http://www.viewpoint.com/avalon.html or
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/mirrors/avalon/ is a mirror.
Avalon is probably the best site you'll find for free 3D model data.
However, the home page at Viewpoint also has pointers to their free
and commercial models if you can't find what you need at Avalon.
Another commercial model vendor on the net is MeshMart at:
http://cedar.cic.net/~rtilmann/mm/
(See also 2 - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Mailing Lists)
------------------------------
Subject 6.3 - "How can I view these pictures?"
If you're using Unix, you can use XV which is available as a source
distribution from many sites, or ImageMagick, again available on many
sites. It should be noted that XV v3.00, which is installed at some
sites, does not display TGA files, although XV v3.10 and ImageMagick
do.
If XV and/or ImageMagick do not support a particular image format you
have, it probably doesn't actually exist :-). However, if you need
to handle large numbers of images in batch form, or if you don't have
an X windows display and you want to manipulate images (but not
necessarily view them), chances are that the netpbm package is what
you need. Netpbm is a command line utility, and can converting
images from practically any format to any other, but it does not
display the images themselves.
If you're on a PC and using DOS, you'll probably want to get one of
the myriad of image display programs, such as QPV or PICLAB to do
the displaying. For MS-Windows users, lview seems to be a popular
display/editing program, and for OS/2 there is PMJpeg. There are
kegs-o-megs of PC image viewers at most ftp sites, so take your time
and find one you like that has the features you need.
These packages are available in countless locations on the Internet
(see 4 - Utilities and Other Software).
------------------------------
Subject 6.4 - "What's the difference between rendering and ray tracing?"
Ray tracing *is* rendering. Rendering is the term which refers to
the act of "painting" a digital image from some stored data. There
are many different methods of rendering, such as ray tracing, radiosity,
z-buffer, painter's algorithm, etc. Each method has its own merits,
usually a trade-off between speed and quality or capabilities.
------------------------------
Subject 6.5 - "This picture doesn't trace."
I know it might sound a bit obvious, but have you read the error
message and tried to understand it? Did you look in the manual?
Still nothing? I know I sound cynical, but it's not uncommon for
people to have something go wrong and then post straight to the 'net
without even *trying* to figure out what went wrong. A little
patience and thought will solve the problem a lot quicker.
Here's some common problems:
* POV-Ray versions
A lot of people get fooled when trying to trace old POV-Ray code
with a new version. Use the -MV1.0 option or use #version in the
code to get the parser to treat it as old code. You may find that
you have to change any references to "shapes.inc" to "shapes.old".
The POV-Ray docs can help you out here. What do you mean "I have't
read the docs"? Go read them.
* Include files
Have you checked that you've #included any include files that your
scene requires? Include files tend to define colours, textures or
objects that your scene may use. Make sure you've told the ray
tracer where to look for include files. For example, POV-Ray uses
the -L option to specify the directory where include files are, eg.
-L/home/adilger/povray/include
The POV-Ray docs can help you out here. What do you mean "I
haven't read the docs"? Go read them.
------------------------------
Subject 6.6 - "I traced my picture, but I can't see anything."
If the picture is totally dark, there are a few things you can check:
* Have you added any light sources?
* Are the light sources blocked by anything? (This is a favourite of
Andy's - he puts in a large sphere for the sky and then adds or
moves lights *outside* the sky sphere. Where did the lights go?)
* Where are you looking? Is your camera inside an object (oops)?
* Have you applied textures to your objects. If you haven't, you
might find that your ray tracer defaults your object to be black.
Have you actually put anything into the picture? This isn't as silly
as it sounds. If you #declare on object (POV-Ray, again) like this:
#declare my_object=
union {
sphere { <0, 0, 0> 1 }
cylinder { <-2, 0, 0> <2, 0, 0> 0.5 }
}
Then you have just told the ray tracer that when you refer to
"my_object", you actually mean a union of a sphere and a cylinder as
shown. To use the object, you must explicitly put it in:
object { my_object }
------------------------------
Subject 6.7 - "I traced my picture, but the output is garbage."
Did you specify the correct output file format? Most ray tracers
have several options for output file formats. If you haven't
explicitly specified the output format, there's a good chance it's
not what you want it to be. Also note that using a file name with an
extension (like .TGA) does not necessarily mean this is the format of
image. This is a common mistake with POV-Ray 2.2 for Unix which uses
an obscure output format by default. Similarly, if you don't compile
in the URT support for Rayshade, you will get MTV format output files.
What is MTV you ask? It's one of the very first freeware ray tracers,
written by Mark Terrence VandeWettering, now with Pixar.
Some image display programs use the file extension to determine the
file contents, so if you call the file output.tga, and it's actually
a PNG image, your display program may complain that the TGA file is
corrupted. This is especially a problem with TGA files, since they
do not start with a "magic number", and this makes file identification
difficult.
------------------------------
Subject 6.8 - "What does this mean..."
Some ray tracing and related terms you might come across:
* CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) - A term describing ways in which
you can build up complex shapes from simple primitives like cubes,
speres, and cylinders. By combining the primitives in different
ways, namely adding them together (union), taking one away from the
other (difference) or getting the part where they intersect
(intersection) you can make small building blocks, which can in
turn be used to make more complex CSG objects.
* Height Field - A height field can be thought of as a 3 dimensional
bar graph. It is a grid of data where the value at any point
corresponds to the "altitude" of that point. Height fields are
typically stored as grayscale images with the lighter areas being
higher, and the darker areas lower. Heightfields are usually used
to create natural looking terrain, such as mountains, hills, and
craters, but they can be used anywhere that you need to extrude a
shape (eg a prism, text, or an embossed pattern). You can get
software that will convert actual altitude data into a heightfield
image (DEM2POV), software that will create realistic heightfields
mathematically (HF-Lab, Terrain Maker, Vista Pro, Fractint), or
software to create raised patterns (Level Connector).
* Radiosity - Most ray tracers use an empirical lighting model - that
is the parameters specified for lights and objects do not really
correspond to physical properties, but are selected to make things
look good. Radiosity calculates the reflections and lighting
between all objects in the scene, and gives a more realistic
rendering of the scene. This method is very good at representing
the diffuse lighting in a scene, while ray tracing is better at
handling the reflection. In some renderers, both techniques are
used to give spectacular results. Needless to say, radiosity is
even more computationally complex than ray tracing.
------------------------------
Subject 6.9 - "Rotating/scaling this object doesn't work properly."
With most ray tracers, rotating on object in a given direction
rotates it around the axis *not* around its own centre. If your
object is centred on the X axis and you rotate it in the X direction,
it will spin. However, if it is some distance from the axis and you
rotate it, it will "orbit" the X axis, tracing a circle with a radius
equal to the distance of the object from the axis.
Confused? Think of the Earth spinning on it's axis. It doesn't go
anywhere because it is centred on its axis (ignoring rotation around
the Sun). The moon, however is some distance from the Earth's axis
and as it rotates around that axis, it travels through space,
orbiting the Earth.
To work out which way something will move, you need to know if your
ray tracer uses a left or a right handed co-ordinate system.
POV-Ray, for example, uses a left handed system. To work out which
way an object will turn, point your thumb in the positive direction
of the axis you're rotating in and the way you fingers curl indicate
the direction of positive rotation. The hand you use to do this
depends on your ray tracer; left-handed, use left hand, right handed,
use right hand.
The same thing goes for scaling. If your object is already some
distance away from the origin, that distance will also get scaled.
For example, if you have a sphere 2 units away from the origin, with
a radius of 1 and you scale it by 2, the radius will now be 2 *and*
the distance from the origin will be 4.
------------------------------
Subject 6.10 - "Why is the Z axis is pointing the wrong way?"
A common complaint in c.g.r.r is why POV (or other computer graphic
program) has the Z axis pointing in the "wrong" direction. What's
wrong with the people who make this software? Didn't they take
elementary geometry?
The truth is, what is the right co-ordinate system in computer
graphics, depends on where you started out. Engineering and mathematics
people use a right-handed co-ordinate system. The X and Y axes form a
horizontal plane, with X increasing to the right and Y increasing
"upwards". When we have a Z axis, it is usually considered the
"height" or "altitude" axis, and it would be coming out of the page
of a 2D graph.
The origins of computer graphics was in 2D, shown on a monitor, with
the same X and Y axes (X positive to the right and the Y positive
upwards). When 3D was added in, the Z axis was used as the "depth"
into the monitor, since one was only interested in items "in front"
of the user, and not those behind where they couldn't be seen. Since
it was easiest to only store positive numbers for the Z value, the Z
axis is positive away from the viewer. This is a left-handed
co-ordinate system.
Because of the way the graphics appear on the monitor, it is often
easiest to consider that Y is the vertical axis, since it is consistent
for both 2D and 3D graphics. As for which one is better - you decide.
However, don't complain about software which uses the one that you
don't like, since you can always go ahead and write your own software...
------------------------------
Subject 6.11 - "Which 3D accelerator card will speed up raytracing best?"
The answer to this question is generally "None". Commercial 3D cards
accelerate the transformation of 3D polygons, shading, z-buffering,
rasterizing, and related functions. These are all related to scan-line
rendering, but are not really as useful for ray tracing. It's not
because 3D cards are new, and it's not because people who write ray
tracers don't know about these cards, but because these cards are simply
not useful for speeding up ray tracing.
------------------------------
Subject 6.12 - "Who is..."
This section looks at some of the ray tracing artists and people who
are particularly well known for their work, be it images or software.
The list is in strict alphabetical order as I don't fancy the task of
trying be subjective about who's pictures are better than who's.
A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: A lot of these people have to pay for their
Email and 'net access. DO NOT send them large images or other posts
without checking with them first. Certain members of the POV team
have recently had some pretty hideous costs (like $30 for 1 mail
item) because of this. (Was that OK, Dan?)
* Truman Brown
Truman Brown <7147...@compuserve.com> is particularly well known
for his "woild" series of images. He is a self-confessed "Obsessed
Programmer / Trace-aholic" and has written a range of very useful
utilities, including Connect The Dots Smoother (CTDS), Circle
Master (CM) and its companion, HYPE.
He has an understanding wife but his kids wish he didn't hog the PC
so much. His utilities are available from most FTP sites and you
can check out some of his images at:
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame/
http://www.povray.org/hof/
* Dan Farmer
One of the original POV-Ray development team, Dan Farmer has
created a large portion of the POV-Ray demo scenes, as well as
other amazing images including the stunning "frosty.gif". Dan
explains how he did it:
"The image was done in POV-Ray. It's really quite simple. The face
is a freely available dataset produced by Mira Imaging... I'm sure
it exists on the net somewhere. The fractal shape is done with
Fractint, using the 16 bit continuous potential features. It's an
inverted Mandelbrot set. The silver texture is Silver1 in
textures.inc. The sky is the usual bozo, but it's mapped onto a
plane, not a sphere. Floor is an imagemapped plane. That's all
there is to it!"
Frosty's at ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame/frosty.gif
The Mira dataset ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/scenes/mirpov.zip
Unfortunately, Dan rarely releases his source code any more due to
certain unscrupulous sorts using his images for commercial purposes
without payment or even permission. Luckily, he has made the scene
file for this image available on the POV-Ray CD-ROM which is also
available online (see 1 - Ray Tracing Software).
Dan has taken a leave of absence from the POV Team because he wants
to spend more time with his real life than answering questions. He
asks that people not contact him with questions about POV-Ray.
* Eric Haines
Eric A. Haines <er...@eye.com> has probably done as much as anyone
to make ray tracing as understandable and accessible as it
currently is. His many, many hours compiling the Ray Tracing News
helped lots of people understand and develop ray tracing software,
as well as serve as a forum for discussion between those interested
in the art. (See 5 - Further Information and Resources).
* Mike Miller
If you ever need inspiration to see what can be done using POV-Ray,
a piece of graph paper and a pencil, then look at some of Mike
Miller's <7035...@compuserve.com> images. His pictures never
fail to impress and he has undoubtedly produced some of the best
pictures ever created with POV-Ray. Mike created many of the demo
scenes that come with POV-Ray and he is responsible for the
excellent textures in "stones.inc".
The cover story of the January 1994 IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications is entitled "Mike Miller's Many Hats" and looks at his
work and includes many of his pictures.
You can find his images and scene files on many sites. A good one
to start with is ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame/ or
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/images/.
Particular ones to look out for are benz9.jpg (model of a 1928
Mercedes Benz), camera.jpg, bug1.gif, etc., etc., the list goes on.
* Ken Musgrave
Ken Musgrave <musg...@siggraph.org> was called "the first true
fractal-based artist" by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals.
His work shows the artistic side of what can be done with
mathematics and inspiration. Many have seen his image "Blessed
State" inside the cover of "Computer Graphics, Principles and
Practice" by Foley & van Dam, the authoratative computer graphics
book. He has an excellent exhibit of his works available on the
WWW at:
http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave/
Ken is currently applying his skills to creating an entire world
model with algorithmic principles. This project is named
Slartibartfast, after the designer of worlds in the "Hitchiker's
Guide to the Galaxy" series.
------------------------------
Subject: 7 - Roll the Credits
Special thanks go to Eric Haines <er...@eye.com> for his help and the
wealth of information he has provided both directly and in Ray Tracing
News, FTP lists, etc.
Thanks also to all those people who maintain other lists,
bibliographies, FTP sites, or have provided me with specific
information, told me where to look, produced mini-faqs (thanks John) or
have just posted answers to the group:
John Beale <be...@leland.Stanford.edu>
Nick Fotis <nfo...@theseas.ntua.gr>
Jim Grimes <ji...@bongo.jpl.nasa.gov>
Ian Grimstead <I.J.Gr...@cm.cf.ac.uk>
Eric Haines <er...@acm.org>
Laszlo Herczeg <las@light-house@whome.planix.com>
Chris W. Morris <ch...@cstone.net>
Frank Neumann <Frank....@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
Bjorn-Kare Nilssen <bjo...@oslonett.no>
George Kyriazis <kyri...@mistral.esd.sgi.com>
Daniel Palermo <pal...@crhc.uiuc.edu>
Harry Rowe <Harry...@wedowind.meaddata.com>
Heinz Schuller <hei...@delphi.com>
Rick Speer <sp...@crl.com>
Greg Ward <gr...@pink.lbl.gov>
Andy Wardley <a...@peritas.demon.co.uk>
Oliver Weyand <chb...@nyx.uni-konstanz.de>
Marius Watz <mar...@ifi.uio.no>
Finally, some king-size thanks to all those people out there who have
developed, and continue to do so, all the ray tracing software and
utilities that keep us so occupied. Wives, girlfriends and children
may disagree on this point, but thanks anyway.
Special awards in this category go to Dan Farmer
<70703...@compuserve.com> who wins the Award for "Not-Only-Doing-All-
His-POV-Team-Stuff-But-Also-Answering-Lots-of-Questions-And-Being-An-
All-Round-Mr.-Nice-Guy", and Chris Cason <Chris...@povray.org> who
gets the coveted "Also-Does-His-POV-Bit-Especially-Being-Admin-of-the-
POV-Site-And-Answering-Questions-As-Well-And-Making-the-POV-CD-Too-And-
Now-Also-The-Creator-Of-WinPOV-To-Boot".
Sorry if I've forgotten anyone. Thanks anyway.
------------------------------
Subject: Epilogue
You may have noticed one or two gaps in the FAQ or spotted a glaring
error, or just thought of something that I really should have
mentioned. If that's the case and you can provide some info or
corrections, then let me know and sort it out.
Well here you are at the end of the document, and your trace is still
only half done. You've probably got time to walk the dog before it's
finished...
Happy Tracing.