Notes on Rayshade - 1 - Introduction

Stephen Peter

Rayshade is a ray tracing program written by Craig Kolb and Rod Bogart. The program reads a scene description file and then renders the scene. The result is a 24 bit colour image which can then be displayed (or printed). This document is not meant as a definitive reference to Rayshade (see Craig Kolb's Rayshade User's Guide), but it is meant to introduce the basics of Rayshade in simple terms (where possible!) and with many examples.


Scene Description Files

The scene description files read by Rayshade need to follow a particular syntax (grammar), deviation from this will often cause Rayshade to flag the line with the incorrect information and then halt - without producing an image. Most of this document is intended to explain the particular syntax required by Rayshade, but it should also give (through the examples) a guide in how to approach creating scenes.

The scenes rendered by Rayshade are described by lists of simple geometric primitives, that are placed in three dimensional cartesian space.

If Rayshade finds errors in a scene description, it identifies the kind of error and the line number at which the error was detected. Sometimes Rayshade identifies the line after the line with the error. If, for example, a sphere has only three numbers following it (rather than the four that are required), rayhsade will not 'flag' the line with the sphere, it will flag the line where the next primitive (or whatever) starts, because it is still looking for that fourth number....


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Defining a View.

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THE END - Notes on Rayshade - 1 - Introduction