Announcing an enhanced Standard Procedural Databases package.

Alexander Enzmann and Eduard Schwan took the SPD package (which, as you may
know, generates procedural models for testing ray tracer speed) and added a
ton of code to it.  The new code now outputs to these formats:

	NFF (used by MTV ray tracer; but the SPD always output using this)
	POV-Ray 1.0
	Polyray v1.4, v1.5
	Vivid 2.0
	Rayshade
	RTrace 8.0.0
	Art 2.3
	QRT 1.5
	POV-Ray 2.0 (no, it's not officially out yet: format subject to change)
	PLG format for use with "rend386"
	Raw triangle output

It can also output the models as line drawings to the screen for previewing:
IBM, Mac, and HPUX drivers are provided, and new drivers are trivial to write
(i.e. draw a line).

There is also a program, showdxf, which will convert or display DXF files
(actually, a limited subset of these - just 3DFACE entities).  There are two
sample DXF files, a skull and an f117, included.

There's also a sample code file which can be used as a template for writing
your own output programs.  What's nice about this package is that by writing a
program representing your model (or interpreting your model as input a la
showdxf.c), you can then convert it to a wide number of formats.  I'd love to
see more show*.c interpreters (e.g. one for Wavefront obj format so that the
cool Viewpoint models at avalon.chinalake.navy.mil can be converted) and other
output formats - send them on!

I did some polishing and whatnot to the distribution and have placed the whole
thing at weedeater.math.yale.edu's /incoming directory as SPDup31.tar.Z and
SPDup31.zip .  Hopefully I didn't futz things too badly (I suspect there needs
to be some file renaming for the Mac version), but let me know if I did.
Anyway, I hope that the permanent home of the code will be
princeton.edu:/pub/Graphics somewhere.

Enjoy (I certainly did!),

Eric Haines
erich@eye.com