Preface

! Rayshade is a program for creating ray-traced images. It reads a description of a scene to be rendered and produces a color image corresponding to the description. ! Rayshade was designed to make it easy to create nice pictures. It was also meant to be flexible, easy to modify, and relatively fast.

! The first version of was written in 1987-1998 at Princeton University with help and encouragement from David Dobkin and David Hoffman. That version was heavily based on a public-domain ``introductory'' ray tracer written by Roman Kuchkuda. ! Changes to from that point until version 4.0 were evolutionary in nature. The current version is to a large extent a re-write, and an attempt has been made to remove some of the fundamental — 1,20 —-