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1992-09-13
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From: IN%"eye!erich@wrath.cs.cornell.EDU" "Eric Haines" 13-OCT-1989 13:11:55.44
To: cornell!vax5!cnsy@wrath.cs.cornell.EDU
CC:
Subj: Next News
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Date: Fri, 13 Oct 89 11:43:05 edt
From: Eric Haines <eye!erich@wrath.cs.cornell.EDU>
Subject: Next News
To: cornell!vax5!cnsy@wrath.cs.cornell.EDU
Message-Id: <8910131543.AA11686@juniper>
John,
Here you go! Please pass on to comp.graphics.
_ __ ______ _ __
' ) ) / ' ) )
/--' __. __ , --/ __ __. _. o ____ _, / / _ , , , _
/ \_(_/|_/ (_/_ (_/ / (_(_/|_(__<_/ / <_(_)_ / (_</_(_(_/_/_)_
/ /|
' |/
"Light Makes Right"
October 13, 1989
Volume 2, Number 7
Compiled by Eric Haines, 3D/Eye Inc, 2359 Triphammer Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850
NOTE ADDRESS CHANGE: wrath.cs.cornell.edu!eye!erich
[distributed by Michael Cohen <m-cohen@cs.utah.edu>, but send
contributions and subscriptions requests to Eric Haines]
All contents are US copyright (c) 1989 by the individual authors
Archive locations: anonymous FTP at cs.uoregon.edu (128.223.4.1) and at
freedom.graphics.cornell.edu (128.84.247.85), /pub/RTNews
Contents:
Introduction
New People and Address Changes
Solid Surface Modeler Information, by Eric Haines
Minimum Bounding Sphere Program, by Marshall Levine
Parallelism & Modeler Info Request, by Brian Corrie
======== USENET cullings follow ========
Ray Tracer Available, by Craig Kolb
Source from Roy Hall's Book, by Tim O'Connor
More on Texture Mapping by Spatial Position, by Paul Lalonde
Procedural Bump-mapping Query, by Prem Subrahmanyam
Ray Tracer Performance on Machines,
by Gavin A. Bell, Phil Dykstra, Steve Lamont
Projective Mapping Explanation, by Ken "Turk" Turkowski
Intersection Calculation Problem Request, Jari Toivanen
Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics - Call for Errata,
by David Rogers
Raytracing on NCUBE Request, by Ping Kang Hsiung
Intersection Between a Line and a Polygon (UNDECIDABLE??),
by Dave Baraff, Tom Duff
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
It's October, the time when the air turns chilly, the leaves turn red, and
people's minds turn towards releasing a public domain version of their ray
tracer. Holy smokes there's a lot of them coming out lately! This month
Craig Kolb's ray tracer has become available, along with the first PD ray
tracer from Australia, by David Hook. Paul Lalonde mentions that his will be
coming out soon, and will include spline surfaces. Also, David Kirk and Jim
Arvo have created a ray tracer which they used in their workshop in Australia,
and which may be released to the general public soon. Other code that has
been made available is that printed in Roy Hall's _Illumination and Color in
Computer Generated Imagery_ book.
Next month I hope to collect various timing information from all sorts of
ray tracers on all sorts of machines. I hope to do a "trace-off" sometime
soon, comparing MTV's, Craig's, DBW, QRT, ART, mine, and any others I can get
up and running. If anyone else has any timings or observations on performance
of ray tracers and various machines, please send them to me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New People and Address Changes
David Hook
dgh@munnari.OZ.AU
Dept. Of Engineering Computer Resources
University Of Melbourne
Parkville, Vic, 3052
Australia
G'day.
Our major area of interest in ray tracing is CSG modeling and we have a
locally developed ray tracer which is a step towards this, as a department we
are also involved with the Faculty of Architecture at this University, so we
are starting to look at special effects somewhat more seriously than before.
This has also led to a greater interest in acceleration techniques.
Personally, I am currently doing a masters degree in the area of CSG and ways
of introducing patches into the model. The rendering technique being used is
ray tracing.
[And a further note from David Hook:]
The mailing list has been set up on munnari, so if you send it to
rtnews@munnari.OZ.AU, it will (should) travel around Oz to the people who want
it. I am asking people who subscribe if they wish to be on the contact list,
etc...
As a bit of additional info, I have written a ray-tracer which does CSG and
renders algebraic surfaces, (ala Pat Hanrahan), although in this case it's
built around Sturm Sequences and we occasionally use CSG to take
cross-sections of the surfaces. The interest in algebraic surfaces began
because a friend of mine was struggling with a 6th order surface known as the
Hunt Surface, getting a good feel for the cusps on it was turning out to be
awful using polygonal subdivision. In any case there is a public domain
version of all this sitting in pub on munnari.OZ.AU (128.250.1.21) which can
be got by anonymous ftp. The file is vort.tar.Z. Knowing a bit more about
the whole business now, it's a bit of an embarrassment! Still it may be of
interest to someone and constructive criticism is always welcome.
[From a README file in his ray tracing distribution:]
By the by, for people who are interested, there are an excellent series of
papers on ray tracing and computer graphics in general published in the NATO
ASI Series of books. The volume in question is in Vol. 40, series F, and is
titled "Theoretical Foundations of Computer Graphics and CAD". It was
published in 1988 Springer-Verlag. Roman Kuchkuda's paper in it "An
Introduction To Ray Tracing", would be the best introductory paper we have
seen to date. Apart from that it was the first paper we found that actually
said what a superquadric was!
--------
NAME: Hench, Stephen D. SNAIL MAIL: 2621-C Stewart Drive
E MAIL: hench@csclea.ncsu.edu Raleigh, NC 27603
BRIEF: Undergrad in Mathematics and Computer Science at NCSU.
Interested in ray tracing (would I want to subscribe
if I wasn't?), radiosity, and rendering in general.
--------
Marshall Levine
136 1937 Hall Wilson College
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 734-6061
Home:
Marshall Levine
5212 Louise Avenue
Encino, California 91316
(818) 995-6528
(818) 906-7068
E-mail:
(1) mplevine@phoenix.princeton.edu or:
(2) mplevine@gauguin.princeton.edu or:
(3) mplevine@bogey.princeton.edu
My main interests are helicopters and computer graphics. Within graphics, I
am interested in animation and motion control. While I think it is great to
see a ray-traced magnifying glass sitting on top of a cicuit board, I would
rather see the magnifying glass fly smoothly over a spinning board while the
camera flies smoothly through the scene. I am currently designing a flexible
graphics language with a friend of mine, Chris Williams (Princeton U. '92).
If anyone is interested, I can say more about that later.
--------
Cornell Program of Computer Graphics
A ray tracing mailing list has been set up by Tim O'Connor:
ray-tracing-news@wisdom.graphics.cornell.edu
Program of Computer Graphics
120 Rand Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
People on this list who've already been intro'ed here include: Roy Hall,
Mark Reichert, Ben Trumbore, and Tim O'Connor.
New people and brief bio sketches:
Wash Wawrzynek - paw@squid.graphics.cornell.edu
C