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- *******************************************************************
- SIPP -- 3d rendering package
-
- Copyright Equivalent Software HB 1992
-
- Authors: Jonas Yngvesson jonas-y@isy.liu.se
- Inge Wallin ingwa@isy.liu.se
- _
- Linkoping Institute of Technology
- Sweden
- *******************************************************************
-
- This is SIPP, the SImple Polygon Processor, version 3.0. SIPP is a
- library for creating 3-dimensional scenes and rendering them using a
- scan-line z-buffer algorithm. A scene is built up of objects which
- can be transformed with rotation, translation and scaling. The
- objects form hierarchies where each object can have arbitrarily many
- subobjects and subsurfaces. A surface is a number of connected
- polygons which are rendered with either Phong, Gouraud or flat
- shading. An image can also be rendered as a line drawing of the
- polygon edges without any shading at all.
-
- The library supports texture mapping with textures in up to
- 3-dimensions and automatic interpolation of texture coordinates.
- Simple anti-aliasing can be performed through oversampling. A scene
- can be illuminated by an arbitrary number of light sources and a
- number of different lightsources are availiable. The light from some
- of them are capable of casting shadows of objects. A basic shading
- algorithm is provided with the library, but the user can also use his
- own shading algorithms for each surface to produce special effects.
- Objects can have varying degree of transparency, controlled by the
- shader.
-
- It is possible to create several virtual cameras and use any of them
- as viewpoint for a particular rendering.
-
- Images can be rendered directly onto a file in the Portable Pixmap
- format (ppm) (or, for line images, Portable Bitmap, pbm) or written
- using user-supplied functions. This function can, for instance,
- write into a pixmap in memory or into a screen window or anything
- else.
-
-
- To view the images there are several programs which can display the
- ppm format. If the X-window system is availiable we can recommend the
- programs xv and xloadimage. Both are availiable by anonymous ftp from
- export.lcs.mit.edu (18.24.0.12) in the contrib directory, and probably
- from several other sites also. The pbmplus package wich can convert
- the ppm format into a large number of other formats (GIF, TIFF, etc.)
- is also availiable by anonymous ftp from the same site.
-
-
- To install the library, the demonstration programs and the manuals,
- see the file INSTALL for details.
-
-
- The directory 'doc' contains standard UNIX man pages for quick
- reference, and also a complete "User's Guide" in texinfo format. To
- make a typeset version of this manual you need the TeX typesetting
- system. You can also create an online info-manual of this document,
- either with the program 'makeinfo' or in GNU-emacs with the command
- M-X texinfo-format-buffer. Here also, see the file INSTALL for more
- details.
-
-
- If you have used SIPP before, you might notice a number of
- incompatibilities with version 2.0 and 2.1. The file COMPATIBILITY
- describes what features are incompatible with the older versions and
- how you can compile your old programs with the new library.
-
-
- Please send any enhancements, bug reports and fixes to us.
- Especially, if you create nice new object types or interesting
- shaders, we would be grateful if you sent the C functions to us. We
- could then compile a library of object functions and/or shaders and
- let other people share the benefits.
-
- Linkoping 2 May 1992
-
- enjoy! /Jonas & Inge
-