Collection of Tools & Utilities/Collection of Tools and Utilities.iso/graphic/rtnews.zip/RTNV4N1

Text File | 1992-09-13 | 128KB | 2,950 lines

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            "Light Makes Right"

               March 1, 1990
            Volume 4, Number 1

Compiled by Eric Haines, 3D/Eye Inc, 2359 Triphammer Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850
    [e-mail] or uupsi!eye!erich
All contents are US copyright (c) 1990 by the individual authors
Archive locations: anonymous FTP at weedeater.math.yale.edu [130.132.23.17],
    /pub/RTNews, and others.
UUCP archive access: write Kory Hamzeh (quad.com!avatar!kory) for info.

Contents:
    Introduction
    New People, Address Changes, etc
    Ray Tracing Abstract Collection, by Tom Wilson
    Report on Lausanne Hardware Workshop, by Erik Jansen
    New Version of SPD Now Available, by Eric Haines
    Teapot Timings, by John Spackman
    The Very First Point in Polygon Publication, by Chris Schoeneman
    The Acne Problem, by Christophe Schlick
    Shirley Thesis Available via Anonymous FTP, by Pete Shirley
    Some Thoughts On Anti-aliasing, by Zap Anderssen, Eric Haines
    New VORT Release, and the VORT Chess Set, by Eric H. Echnida, David Hook
    Best (or at least Better) of RT News, by Tom Wilson
    At Long Last, Rayshade v4.0 is Available for Beta-testing, by Craig Kolb
    Parallel Ray Tracer, by Kory Hamzeh, Mike Muuss, Richard Webb
    Distributed DKB, by Jonas Yngvesson
    Quadrangle Tessellation, by Christophe Schlick
    New Release of Radiance Software & Bug Fixes, by Greg Ward
    Radiance Timings on a Stardent, by Eric Ost
    RTSYSTEM Fast Ray Tracer, by Patrick Aalto
    DKBTrace Beta Available, by David Buck
    "Computer Graphics" 2nd Edition Corrections, Software, etc by Brown Emailer
    Papers which are currently available from the Net via anon. FTP, J. Kouhia
    ======== USENET cullings follow ========
    Ray-Cylinder Intersection Tutorial, by Mark VandeWettering
    C++ Fractal and Ray Tracing Book, by Fractalman
    Ray/Spline Intersection Reference, by Spencer Thomas
    Superquadric Intersection, by Rick Speer, Michael B. Carter
    Comments on Interval Arithmetic, by Mark VandeWettering, Don Mitchell
    Platonic Solids, by Alan Paeth
    Moon Problems, by Ken Musgrave, Pete Shirley
    Ken gave another problem with rendering the moon:
    Shadow Testing Simplification, by Tom Wilson
    SIMD Parallel Ray Tracing, by George Kyriazis, Rick Speer
    Rayscene Animator, by Jari K{hk|nen [sic]
    SIPP 2.0 3d Rendering Package, by Jonas Yngvesson and Inge Wallin
    3DDDA Comments, by John Spackman
    Radiosity Implementation Available via FTP, by Sumant
    Dirt, by Paul Crowley
    Thomson Digital Images University Donation Program, by Michael Takayama
    A Brief Summary of Ray Tracing Related Stuff, Angus Y. Montgomery

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction

Well, it's been awhile.  I've essentially fallen off the face of the earth,
with too much to do.  So, it's time to throw something together during compile
& link time (pity my new machine does is much faster - it makes it harder to
get out an issue).  As usual, the comp.graphics version does not have all the
comp.graphics cullings.  If you want the full issue, pull it in via FTP from
weedeater.math.yale.edu or any other site which carries it.

My big fun for the week has been looking at my head:  I finally received my
head database from the Visual Computing Group (415-688-7315) after getting my
head scanned in by their Cyberware scanner at SIGGRAPH.  Quite a bargain:
around $40 for a 256x512 mesh of my head.  There are lots of bad points in my
database:  the top of my head is missing and my hair has a natty dredlock
look, but still it's pretty amazing, and a little data interpolation here and
there cleans up the dropout data points.

The data comes in a cylindrical coordinate system format, and VSG provides
source code for a number of programs and utilities to convert the data in
various ways.  I've heard Spencer Thomas has rendered his face as an unrolled
cylinder, i.e. a height field.  So, have others out there played with these
data sets much?  Anybody want to trade heads?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New People, Change of Addresses, etc

--------

Michael Cohen's email address is now [e-mail]

Jim Arvo's email address is now [e-mail]

Peter Miller's email address is now [e-mail]

--------

Brian Corrie, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.

I am back from my trip down under, and have a new account here
at UVic.

My new address is [e-mail]

One new area of interest.  I like the idea of the shading language provided by
the RenderMan Interface.  Do you know of anyone doing work in this area?  I
want to make a shader compiler, along with a shader library that has some of
the pixar functions (noise..etc), that will compile a shader description into
a linkable module that a renderer can link to at compile time.  Kind of a half
way step between interpreting the shader description and hard coding the
shader into the renderer itself.  If I set up some binding rules then any
renderer that follows those rules will be able to link to any shader compiled
with the shader compiler.  We can then pass around shader descriptions between
users.  What do you think?

--------

# Patrick Flynn - geometry (solid and image), algorithmics, computer vision
# Department of Computer Science and Engineering
# University of Notre Dame
# Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
# [phone]
alias patrick_flynn [e-mail]

My interest in ray tracing was an itch that I couldn't scratch during 1989 and
much of 1990, while I was dissertating.  I'm presently mapping subproblems
(like rendering) in model-based computer vision onto parallel architectures,
and developing a graphics course for seniors and grad students, with future
(unfocused) plans for an ongoing research program in graphics.

--------

# Jean-Philippe Thirion - coherency, interval arithmetic, data structure
# I.N.R.I.A.
# Domaine de Voluceau - Rocquencourt
# B.P. 105 - 78153 LE CHESNAY CEDEX
# FRANCE
# (33 1) 39 63 52 79
alias thirion [e-mail]

    I worked from 1986 to 1990 for a PHD thesis at the L.I.E.N.S., Paris,
France, with Pr Claude Puech.  First about data structures and hidden part
removal problems, then about the uses of coherency in order to improve ray
tracing.  This work have lead to a PHD thesis about object space and ray
coherency for ray tracing (in french), and two research reports (in English):

- Tries, data structure based on binary representation for ray tracing
- Interval arithmetic for high resolution ray tracing

    The first report have been published in Eurographics' 90.  I am
writing now a third report about some enumeration problems on binary space
partitioning trees.

--------

Christophe Schlick
LaBRI
351, Cours de la Liberation
33405 TALENCE CEDEX --- FRANCE
Email: [e-mail]

I am currently working on my PhD thesis on "Realistic Image Synthesis".  It
will include some classic topics as ray-tracing, radiosity, hydrid methods,
antialising and parallelization of those techniques.

--------

# Henry Kaufman
# Brown University graphics group
alias    henry_kaufman    [e-mail]

I worked on an ARTS ray tracer (with the SEADS) data structure.  Since the
details of their algorithm were not well described in their paper (in my
opinion), I had to figure out most of the algorithm myself.  The part I found
interesting was "scan converting" my quadric surface primitives into the SEADS
voxels.  I tried to implement Bresenham style scan converters, which turned
out to be fairly efficient.  I just thought I'd mention it, even though you
are probably already familiar with the algorithms involved.

--------

# Nick Holliman - parallelism, CSG, spatial subdivision, ray tracing.
# School of Computer Studies,
# University of Leeds,
# Woodhouse Lane,
# Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS2 9JT.
# ENGLAND
# [phone]
email: [e-mail]

I have just completed my PhD at Leeds and currently have an IBM research
fellowship at Leeds, working with the IBM UK Scientific Centre, Winchester.

My PhD work was the development of a parallel CSG ray tracer.  This takes a
CSG model and creates a distributed octree using a parallel algorithm.  It can
then ray trace the distributed octree and uses caching to avoid replicating
all the data on each processor.  The system scales well making good use of up
128 T800 transputers (as many as I could find in one place) handling models of
up to 20,000 CSG primitives.  We have recently extended this to support
parallel incremental update algorithms, so given a small change to the CSG
model the system updates the distributed octree and then updates the region of
image affected by the change.  Current work is looking at increasing the model
size, improving the scalability and porting the system to other parallel
machines.

I would be keen to hear from anyone working on similar parallel algorithms and
if anyone is interested they are welcome to a copy of my thesis.

--------

Ning Zhang

I have written a Radiosity package and both input and output are based on the
NFF file format.  Have you considered to have a similar benchmarking package
for comparing different Radiosity software and hardware?  I think that would
be an interesting subject.  [Any volunteers? - EAH]

----- Self description -----
# Ning Zhang - Radiosity, Raytracing, Image Compression
# School of Electrical Engineering
# The University of Sydney
# NSW 2006, Australia
# + 61 (02) 692 2962
alias ning_zhang [e-mail]

I have been in Germany for two year as a visiting scientist at the Computer
Graphics Center (ZGDV), Darmstadt.  There I developed a Radiosity/Raytracing/
FastZBuffer package running on many platforms, including 386PC.  Recently I
came to Australia as a visiting fellow at the Univ.  of Sydney.

Email: [e-mail]
       (In Germany, [e-mail] or [e-mail])

--------

Craig McNaughton

Interests - CSG, Animation, higher dimension, distortions

Address -
C/- Computer Science Department
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin
New Zealand
ph ([phone]

I'm in the Graphics Research Group at Otago University, currently doing a
Masters.  My main project at the moment is a general 4D CSG ray tracer, and
with luck, that will soon be extended to nD.  Other current work include
getting the most out of 8 bit displays, and character animation with CSG
systems.

--------

# David B. Wecker - Author of DBW_Render, DIDDLY and other rendering tools
# Digital Equipment Corporation
# 1175 Chapel Hills Drive, CXN1/2
# Colorado Springs, CO  80920-3952
# [phone]
alias    david_wecker    [e-mail]

If people want the current version of DBW (V2.0) for their Amiga, they should
contact:

    William T. Baldridge
    2650 Sherwood Lane
    Pueblo, CO   81005
        (BIX: WBALDRIDGE)

--------

David Tonnesen
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario  M5S 1A4
[phone] and 978-6619

research: modeling and rendering

e-mail:  [e-mail]   (UUCP/CSNET/ARPANET)
     [e-mail]      (BITNET)

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto and interested in a variety
of graphic topics including ray tracing.  Other areas I am interested in
include models of deformable models, global illumination models, models of
natural phenomena, physically based modeling, etc...  Basically modeling and
rendering.

--------

Jim Rose, Visualization Research Asst.
Visualization Research Group
Utah Supercomputing Institute
[e-mail]

--------

Bruce Kahn - general concepts, portable packages, microcomputer based pkgs.
Data General Corp.
4400 Computer Dr.
MS D112
Westboro MA 01580
[phone]
[e-mail]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ray Tracing Abstract Collection, by Tom Wilson ([e-mail])

[Tom has done the graphics community a great service in making available (for
free) all the ray tracing abstracts from articles he's collected.  If you run
into a ray tracing article title which sounds interesting, you should check
here first to see if it's really what you want before wasting time tracking it
down. --EAH]

The next release of the collection of ray tracing abstracts are ready.  I've
put them in several ftp sites (listed below).  To get it, do the following:
get rtabs.shar.1.91.Z using binary mode.  Uncompress it.  Unshar it (sh
rtabs.1.91).  Then read READ.ME.  If you have any problems, send me e-mail.
The abstracts can be converted to two forms:  Latex (preferred) or troff -me.
The filters I've included may help you write your own if you need something
else.  I received no feedback concerning problems, so evidently it works for
those who tried it.

USA Sites:
weedeater.math.yale.edu (130.132.23.17) in directory pub/Papers
   Craig Kolb <[e-mail]>
karazm.math.uh.edu (132.170.108.2) in directory pub/Graphics
   J. Eric Townsend <[e-mail]>
iear.arts.rpi.edu (128.113.6.10) in directory pub/graphics/ray
   George Kyriazis <[e-mail]>

Australia Site:
gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au (128.250.1.63) in directory pub/rtabs
   Bernie Kirby <[e-mail]>

Finland Site:
maeglin.mt.luth.se (130.240.0.25) in directory graphics/raytracing/Doc
   Sven-Ove Westberg <[e-mail]>

Tom Wilson
Center for Parallel Computation
University of Central Florida
P.O. Box 25000
Orlando, FL 32816-0362
[e-mail]

--------

Juhana Kouhia notes:

I have converted RT abstract to Postscript format - it's available from
nic.funet.fi pub/graphics/papers directory as wils90.1.ps.Z.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Report on Lausanne Hardware Workshop, by Erik Jansen

There was a Hardware Workshop on the 2nd and 3rd of September in Lausanne.
Three papers on ray tracing are worth mentioning:

%A M-P Hebert
%A M.J. McNeill
%A B. Shah
%A R.L. Grimsdale
%A P.F. Lister
%T MARTI, A Multi-processor Architecture for Ray Tracing Images

%A D. Badouel
%A T. Priol
%T An Efficient Parallel Ray Tracing Scheme for Highly Parallel Architectures

%A Li-Sheng Shen
%A E. Deprettere
%A P. Dewilde
%T A new space partitioning Technique to Support a Highly Pipelined
%T Architecture for the Radiosity Method

The first paper discussed a load distribution based on an image space
partitioning.  Additionally the scene was stored in an octree type of space
subdivision of which the first (top) n levels were duplicated over the
processors and stored in their local cache.  The other levels of the database
were communicated when needed.  Their figures (testpicture "gears") showed
that a local cache of 1/8 to 1/4 of the size of the total database is
sufficient to avoid communication bottle-necks.  It was not clear from the
presentation whether these results also hold for more complex scenes.

The second paper discussed a virtual memory scheme that distributed the data
base over the processors in a way that 'ray coherence' is maintained as much
as possible.  The left-over memory at the processors is used as a cache.

The third paper discussed a ray coherence scheme that was based on a
subdivision of a ray frustrum in sectors and a comparison of a probablistic
and deterministic method to determine the width (angle) of the sectors.

These papers will be published by Springer in "Advances in Computer Graphics
Hardware", vol. V. (ed. R. Grimsdale and A. Kaufman).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Version of SPD Now Available, by Eric Haines

Version 3.0 of the Standard Procedural Databases is out.  The major addition
is the teapot database.  Other changes include being able to input a size
factor on the command line, changing mountain.c to mount.c (for IBM users),
and many changes and new statistics in the README file.

The teapot database is essentially that published in IEEE CG&A in Jan. 1987.
A checkerboard has been added underneath it to give it something to reflect &
cast a shadow upon.  The checkerboard also reflects the subdivision amount of
the teapot patches, e.g. a 7x7 checkerboard means that each patch is
subdivided to 7x7x2 triangles.  Degenerate (e.g. no area, 0 length normal)
polygons are either removed or corrected by the program.  The bottom of the
teapot can optionally be removed.

The images for these databases and other information about them can be found
in "A Proposal for Standard Graphics Environments," IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications, vol. 7, no. 11, November 1987, pp. 3-5.  See IEEE CG&A, vol. 8,
no. 1, January 1988, p. 18 for the correct image of the tree database
(the only difference is that the sky is blue, not orange).  The teapot
database was added later, and consists of a shiny teapot on a shiny
checkerboard.

The SPD package is available via anonymous FTP from:

    weedeater.math.yale.edu [130.132.23.17]
    irisa.fr [131.254.2.3]

among others.  For those without FTP access, write to the netlib automatic
mailer:  research!netlib and [e-mail] are the sites.  Send a one line
message "send index" for more information, or "send haines from graphics" for
the latest version of the SPD package.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Teapot Timings, by John Spackman

    I enclose some timing figures for the SPD `teapot', ray-traced at
various degrees of tessellation.  All images were rendered at 512x512 with two
light sources.  The models were triangulated at a pre-processing stage to
support smooth shading with barycentric co-ordinates.  I'm not sure whether
all other conditions were as documented in SPD, but the output looks right!

    The host machine was a SUN SPARCStation IPC.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
SIZE FACTOR    # TRIANGLES    OCTTREE CONSTRUCTION    RAY-TRACING
                (SECS)            (SECS)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1        58        9.4            841.4

2        248        18.5            832.2

3        570         25.8            837.2

4        1024        35.7            844.8

5        1610        40.8            859.9

6        2328        50.4            864.2

7        3178        56.6            878.8

8        4160        66.5            900.7 (<-- 15 minutes)

9        5274        74.0            911.2

10        6520        81.6            922.7

11        7898        88.7            937.4

12        9408        95.0            954.7

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Very First Point in Polygon Publication, by Chris Schoeneman
    ([e-mail])

   A few months ago there was a discussion on point in polygon algorithms
(again), and one netter suggested perturbing vertices to avoid special cases
(using the Jordan curve theorem).  This led me to the solution I eventually
found that you had already made.

   Anyway, I just found the same solution in CACM, Aug.  1962, p.  434, and I
thought you might be interested to know.

   The algorithm as given has an error in the if statement.  It should
read:
   if (y<=y[i] ...
not
   if (y<y[i] ....

The author, M. Shimrat, doesn't check the horizontal bounds of the edge to
trivially accept or reject the intersection, but this, of course, isn't the
key to the solution.

So much for the patent. :-)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Acne Problem, by Christophe Schlick ([e-mail])


What is Ray-Tracer Acne (RTA) ?
-----------------------------

As defined by Eric Haines in an early Ray-Tracing News, RTA is those black
dots that appear sometimes on a ray-traced image.  RTA can result from two
different phenomena:

Case 1:  When a ray intersects a surface S, some floating round-off can bring
the intersected point P inside the surface (Figure 1).  So, when a reflected
ray or a light ray is shoot from P, it will intersect S and P will be in
shadow.

A common solution to this problem is to let some tolerance (T) for the inter-
section test:  when an intersection point M is found, the distance D between
the origin of the ray and M is computed, and compared to T, the point is
rejected if D < T.  The problem with that method is that T is an absolute
value, coded in the source code and sometimes not adapted for a specific
scene.  A solution could be to scale T by the global diameter of the scene but
there will still be some scene for which it wouldn't work (for instance, a
scene will very big and very small sphere).


Case 2:  This case can only appear when rendering an object composed of
polygons with interpolated normal vectors (Phong's method).  This pathological
case was first described by Snyder & Barr at the SIGGRAPH 87 conference.  When
a ray intersects a point P, the normal vector Np is interpolated from the
vertices normals thanks to the barycentric coordinates (Figure 2).  Thus a
reflected ray or a light ray shot from P according to Np (direction Out in
Figure 2) can intersect another facet (Q on Figure 2).

Here the tolerance solution doesn't work because Q can be arbitrarily far from
P (it depends on the surface curvature and the size of facets).  Thus Snyder &
Barr proposed to move P from the surface along Np by a certain distance D, and
to consider the new point P' as the intersection point from which other rays
are shot.  Again, D is hard-coded and there would be some scenes for which D
is too high or too low.

                  Out
Out       In           Na       \      Nb
  \       /             \        \     /
   \     /               \        \Q  /     Np
-------------- S          \--------*-/    _/
     \ /                   A        B\  _/
      *                               \/___________ In
      P                               P\
                        \______Nc
                        C
  Figure 1                  Figure 2


The solution I propose is easy to implement, and robust whatever the scene.
If you examine Figure 1 and 2, you can see that, in the two case the error
comes from a sideness problem:  a ray that is assumed to be outside S finds an
intersection that is inside S.  In a ray-tracer, you are always carrying (in
the ray structure) a pointer to the media through which the ray is currently
traveling --- that pointer is needed for refraction.  So when intersecting a
surface, you always know the current media.  When you find a ray intersecting
a surface by the inside (negative cosine), the only thing to do is to test the
current media with the media inside the surface (checking the pointers).  If
the two medias are different, there is a sideness problem and the point must
be rejected.  That leads clearly to the following algorithm:

When a ray R traveling through a media M, with a directing [e.g. reflecting]
vector V hits a point P with a normal vector N on a surface S do

Begin

 Compute Cos = -N.V (the cosine between the ray direction and normal vector)

 If Cos > 0                    /* R outside S */

   then no problem

   else                        /* R inside S */

     if M != S then reject the point        /* Sideness error */
           else no problem

End


The cost of that method is a dot product between V and N.  For reflection
rays, that dot product has to be done in the shading phase, so if you store
the result of the cosine in the ray structure, there will no extra cost.  But
for light rays, the dot product is an extra cost.  Compared to Snyder & Barr's
method, the cost is lower because moving a point along a normal vector needs a
linear combination (3 additions, 3 multiplications).  For non-polygonalized
surfaces, the tolerance method is cheaper, but isn't robust.

Well, make your choice. And let me know your comments (and flames !)

--------

From Eric Haines:

    Note that a third source of acne is from bump mapping - essentially it's
the same problem as in case 2, but this problem of the reflection ray passing
through the object can then happen to any object, not just polygons with a
normal per vertex.

    Personally, I solve this problem by doing the check Christophe recommends,
i.e. check the dot product of the normal and the reflection ray.  If the
reflection ray is bad, I solve this by adding some portion of the normal to
the reflection ray which puts the ray above the tangent plane at that point.
This can result in the reflections getting a bit squished on these bad pixels,
but this is much better than seeing black acne pixels.

    Christophe's solution of rejecting intersections if the media does not
match is fine if you have well-behaved users, but our system assumes the user
can do whatever foolish thing he wants with surface definitions (my favorites
are us allowing different indices of refraction and different transmission
colors for front and back faces).

    How do the rest of you solve this problem?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shirley Thesis Available via Anonymous FTP, by Pete Shirley

I have put a postscript copy of my thesis "Physically Based Lighting
Calculations for Computer Graphics" on anon ftp on cica.cica.indiana.edu
(129.79.20.22).  I have broken the thing into several files and compressed
them.  Each file, when uncompressed, should be a stand-alone postscript file.
The whole thing is about 180 pages long, so please don't kill any trees if you
don't really want it!

WARNING:  The thesis files have many postscript figures in it.  It is a real
printer hog.  Please be thoughtful about printing and storing the thing.

I have also put several 24 bit ppm image files in compressed form.  Don't
forget to set ftp in "binary" mode.

If you want this thesis and cannot get/print these files, please don't ask me
for alternate formats until after Dec. 15th.  Thanks.  It will also be
available as a U of Illinois tr (I don't know when).

The directory is pub/Thesis/Shirley.

Pete Shirley
Indiana U
[e-mail]
"I didn't say it was good, just long!"

[This thesis is, among other things, a great survey of most every rendering
technique to date.  "wine.ppm.Z" is an excellent image, even with the week+ of
computation.  - EAH]

Thesis files:

ch1ch2.ps.Z      (125K)  Title page, etc.
             Chapter 1  Introduction
             Chapter 2  Basic Optics
ch3ch4.ps.Z      (105K)  Chapter 3  Global Illumination Problem Formulation
             Chapter 4  Surface Reflection Models
ch5a.ps.Z        (221K)
ch5b.ps.Z        (247K)  Chapter 5  Image Space Solution Methods
ch6a.ps.Z        (261K)
ch6b.ps.Z        (250K)  Chapter 6  Zonal Solution Methods
ch7ch8ch9.ps.Z   (123K)  Chapter 7  Extensions to Basic Methods
             Chapter 8  Implementation
             Chapter 9  Conclusion
app.ps.Z          (44K)  Appendices
bib.ps.Z          (30K)  Bibliography


Picture files (ppm format, Makefile, seeppm.c  viewing on SGI Iris.)

bump.ppm.Z (1.3M)   1024 by 768  camera effects, bump map, indirect lighting.
gal.ppm.Z  (1.2M)   1024 by 768  solid textures, indirect lighting
dense.ppm.Z (.2M)    512 by 384  dense media(8 volume zones for indirect light)
sparse.ppm.Z (1.2M) 1024 by 768  sparse "   "   "
turb.ppm.Z (.3M)     512 by 384  uneven " " " "
lamp.ppm.Z (.8M)    1024 by 768  diffuse transmission, indirect lighting
wine.ppm.Z (1.1M)   1024 by 768  fresnel reflection, bw ray tracing

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some Thoughts On Anti-aliasing, by Zap Anderssen, Eric Haines

From Zap:

About Anti-aliasing:  The "standard" way of doing adaptive anti-a (refered to
as AA from now on, I'm lazy) is to check the color of last pixel and pixel
above or similar, and subdivide if they differ more than "this-n-that" from
eachother.  Although you remember that I said once you should check what
OBJECT you hit (i.e. ignoring the color) and use that as subdiv criteria, and
you posted a mild flame that it wouldn't work on things like a patch mesh
since we spend useless time at all edges that are same all the same....

Well, since I think that all anti-aliasing for texturemapping should be done
in the texture mapping functions (for which I have a nasty trick involving the
angle to the normal vector of the surf and distance to screen e.t.c.) you
should only need extra rays at object edges.

But consider, what makes a surface change color abruptly? It's one of three
things:

* Shadow hits
* Texture map changes color
* Normal veccy moves a lot.

Ok, so here is my idea:  You don't save the COLOR for last pixel, but the
normal vector.  When this deviates more than this_n_that, you supersample.
Then you say "hey, sucker that doesn't work!  Edges may be at different levels
or so but still have the same normal veccy" and to that I say, sure thang,
multiply the normal vector with the distance to the eye, and use that for a
criteria?  Well, we lose the AA on the shadows, regrettably, but we get
another nice criteria....  Just a stupid idea, I know there are flaws, like
what happens if this Red surface is adjoining a blue one (i.e. color diff in
geometry rather than texture map?)  This shouldn't be allowed ;-)

Seriously, there must be ways to fix this?  I NEVER liked the idea of AA'ing
on the color diffs, since texturemaps may introduce heavy diffs even if no
extra rays are really needed....

Any Commentos?

--------

    Oddly, I was just writing up my views on anti-aliasing yesterday,
though for different reasons.  I agree, it would be nice to avoid subdivision
on texture mapped guys.  Let's see, we have aliasing due to:

edges of objects
shadow boundaries
rapidly changing reflections/refractions or highlights
texture maps

So, we could do something like separate out these various factors and do tests
on each.  The trick is that there's interaction between these things (shadows
and texture maps' effects get multiplied together:  rapidly changing textures
in the dark don't matter) and that separating these out gives some weird
problems (say I say "if contributions absolute values vary by more than 10%",
and then I find that my highlight varies 5%, my reflection varies 7% and my
shadow varies %4, should I antialias?  If yes, then why did I bother to
compute these fractional contributions.  If no, then the color really is
varying a lot and should be supersampled).  One advantage of separating stuff
out is for texture maps sampled with area methods (e.g. mipmapping) - if the
surface change ratio is separate from all the other ratios, then we could
simply say "ignore the surface change ratio" if we hit an area-sampled
textured object.

I don't have a good answer (yet?), but am interested to hear your ideas.
Using the normal is interesting, but it feels a bit removed from the problem:
on my "balls" (sphereflake) database, the normals change rapidly for the tiny
spheres, but say all the spheres just reflected things (no diffuse, no
highlights).  Much of the spheres' reflections is the background color, which
doesn't change at all.  So super-samples which merely also hit the background
in this case don't add anything, just waste time.  By checking how much the
reflection color changed, instead, we could shoot less rays.

Variance on something like the normal might be worth tracking, as you point
out, but what if you're, say, viewing a surface which is in shadow?  The
normal varies, but the shading doesn't (no light), so you waste effort.
Another interesting problem is anti-aliasing bump maps:  do you really want to
do much blending, which would then smooth out the bumps?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New VORT Release, and the VORT Chess Set, by Eric H. Echnida, David Hook


Eric H. Echidna ([e-mail]) writes:

Vort 2.0 is now 'officially' available from the following sites:

gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au [128.250.1.63] pub/vort.tar.Z
munnari.oz.au [128.250.1.21] pub/graphics/vort.tar.Z
uunet.uu.net [192.48.96.2] graphics/vogle/vort.tar.Z
 (uucp access as well ~ftp/graphics/vogle/vort.tar.Z

draci.cs.uow.edu.au [130.130.64.3] netlib/vort/*

Australian ACSnet sites may use fetchfile:
    fetchfile -dgondwana.ecr.mu.oz pub/vort.tar.Z

or obtain it from the Australian Netlib at draci.cs.uow.oz

==================

VORT - a very ordinary rendering tool-kit. Version 2.0

VORT is a collection of tools and a library for the generation and
manipulation of images.  It includes a ray tracer, pixel library, and
utilities for doing gamma correction, median cuts, etc...

The current distribution is described as follows:

art    - a ray tracer for doing algebraic surfaces and CSG models. Art
    supports the following primitives: polygons, offfiles, rings, disks,
    torii, superquadrics, spheres, ellipsoids, boxes, cones, cylinders,
    and algebraic surfaces. Tile patterns can be mapped onto all of the
    above except algebraics, boxes, and offfiles. The following textures
    are supported, bumpy, wave, marble, wood, ripple, fuzzy, stucco,
    spotted, granite, and colorblend. The ray tracer uses an
    acceleration technique based on the spatial kd-tree.

tools    - some utilities for fiddling around with image files, and converting
    between various formats. These include tools for converting nff files
    to art format, and vort files to ppm format (and ppm to vort).

docs    - various bits of doco on the tools

lib    - the pixel library files - this has only been developed to the
    point needed to read and write display files.

old    - this contains a program for converting image files from 1.0
    format to 1.1.

sun    - a set of display programs for a sun workstation.

X11    - a set of display programs for a 256 color X machine.

iris    - a display program for an Iris workstation.

pc    - a set of display programs for a PC with VGA Extended Graphics.

movies    - some C programs for generating some sample animations.

tutes    - some C programs for generating some animations that demonstrate
    the texturing.

text3d     - some C routines that read in the hershey fonts provided with VOGLE
    and use them to generate 3d text. Example input files are provided.

--------

    There are several scenes and output images from the raytracer `art'
available on gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au [128.250.1.63] in the directory pub/images.
These images are 8 bit sun rasterfiles and can be converted to other formats
using (for example) pbmplus.

    There are also some simple 36 frame movies in the directories
pub/movies/* .  These files are in VORT format and can be displayed with the
movie programs that come with VORT or can be converted to another format using
the vorttoppm program that comes with VORT.

--------

[Another package available & of interest:]

VOGLE 1.2 fixes some bugs and includes some speed ups from previous versions
of VOGLE.  Specifically, all matrix stack manipulations are now 'done in
place' to save time.

VOGLE stands for "Very Ordinary Graphics Learning Environment".

VOGLE is a device portable 3D graphics library that is loosely based on the
Silicon Graphics Iris GL.  VOGLE also supports 3D software text in the form of
Hershey vector fonts.

--------

David Hook notes:

> 'vort' package includes a chess set (it's the same one as the set at DEC).

There is a better chess set in pub/chess20.tar.Z on gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au
(128.250.1.63) in the anonymous ftp area.  These pieces were also done by the
same person (Randy Brown) who did the ones that are in VORT, but they are much
more detailed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best (or at least Better) of RT News, by Tom Wilson

I've scrunched all of the 1988 RTNews.  I thought I would post to the net to
see if anyone else would want it.  What I've removed is:  names/addresses,
product reviews, reports on tracer bugs/fixes, and anything else that is
"out-dated."  I've taken this approach since these programs probably no longer
have the bugs and errors.  I don't know if many people are going to want the
scrunched versions, but I just wanted basic RT info to print and save.  Some
of the issues weren't scrunched much (mainly the first few), but some are
about 1/3 the size (90,000 => 30,000 bytes).

Tom
[e-mail]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At Long Last, Rayshade v4.0 is Available for Beta-testing, by Craig Kolb
    ([e-mail])

The distribution is available by anonymous ftp from weedeater.math.yale.edu
(130.132.23.17) in pub/rayshade.4.0 as either "rayshade.4.0.tar.Z" or the 16
compressed tar files in the subdirectory "kits@0".

Please direct comments, questions, configuration files, source code, and the
like to [e-mail].  If you get semi-serious about using
rayshade, drop us a line and we'll add you to our mailing list.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this and previous versions of rayshade,
and to those of you who are willing to provide feedback on this Beta release.

>From the README file:
------
This is the Beta release of rayshade version 4.0, a ray tracing program.
Rayshade reads a multi-line ASCII file describing a scene to be rendered
and produces a Utah Raster Toolkit "RLE" format file containing the
ray traced image.

Rayshade features:

    Eleven primitives (blob, box, cone, cylinder, height field,
    plane, polygon, sphere, torus, flat- and Phong-shaded triangle)

    Aggregate objects

    Constructive solid geometry

    Point, directional, extended, spot, and quadrilateral light sources

    Solid procedural texturing, bump mapping, and
        2D "image" texture mapping

    Antialiasing through adaptive supersampling or "jittered" sampling

    Arbitrary linear transformations on objects and texture/bump maps.

    Use of uniform spatial subdivision or hierarchy of bounding
        volumes to speed rendering

    Options to facilitate rendering of stereo pairs

This is Really and Truly a Beta release:  No patches will be issued to upgrade
from this distribution and the 'official' release.  The documentation is
spotty, and there is no proper 'man' page.

There are many differences between rayshade versions 3.0 and 4.0.  In
particular, the input syntax has changed.  Input files created for version 3.0
must be converted to version 4.0 syntax using the provided conversion utility
(rsconvert).

Rayshade v4.0 Beta has been tested on several different UNIX-based computers,
including:  SGI 4D, IBM RS6000, Sun Sparcstation 1, Sun 3/160, DECstation,
Apollo DN10000.  If your machine has a C compiler, enough memory (at least
2Mb), and runs something resembling UNIX, rayshade should be fairly easy to
port.

[...]

It is hoped that the 'official' release will include a library that provides a
C interface to the various ray tracing libraries.  While there is currently no
documentation for the libraries, it should be easy for you to add your own
primitives, textures, aggregates, and light sources by looking at the code and
sending mail if you get stuck.

It is also hoped that the modular nature of the primitive, aggregate, texture,
and light source libraries will make it possible for people to write their own
code and to "swap" objects, textures, and the like over the net.  The object
interfaces are far from perfect, but it is hoped that they provide a
reasonable balance between modularity and speed.

Additional rayshade goodies are available via anonymous ftp from
weedeater.math.yale.edu (130.132.23.17) in pub/rayshade.4.0.  If you have
contributions of new objects, textures, input files, configuration files, or
images to make, feel free to send us email or to drop off a copy via ftp in
the "incoming" directory on weedeater.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Parallel Ray Tracer, by Kory Hamzeh, Mike Muuss, Richard Webb

Parallel Raytracer Available, Kory Hamzeh ([e-mail])

I wrote a parallel raytracer (named 'prt') a while back with the following
features:

    - Runs on multiple heterogeneous machines networked together
      using TCP/IP.
    - Crude load balancing.
    - Primitives:
        - Polygons
        - Spheres
        - Hallow Sphere
        - Cones
        - Cylinders
        - A object that can be expressed in a quadratic form
        - Rings
    - Shading:
        - Gourard
        - Phong
        - Whitted
    - Rendering:
        - Simple: one ray per pixel
        - Stochastic sampling (jitter)
    - Instances of objects.
    - Input format:
        - An extension of nff. I have written a filter which
          will convert NFF files to prt format.
    - Output format:
        - MTV format (24 bit).

Note that prt is a parallel raytracer which spawns off children over multiple
machines to distribute the work.  I have only used it on five Sun
Sparcstations and have gotten excellent performance.  I'm not aware of any
other public domain parallel raytracers other than VM_pRay (which, I believe,
runs only on a specific platform).

--------

Prt version 1.01 is now available from the following sites via
anonymous ftp:

apple.apple.com in /pub/ArchiveVol2/prt
iear.arts.rpi.edu in pub/graphics/ray/prt

If you have a copy of version 1.0, I would recommend that you get a copy of
the newer one.  I will *not* post it again in alt.sources.  If you can't ftp
it, send me mail and I will mail you a copy.

Version 1.01 had some minor bugs fixed and I included some info that I had
forgotten to put in the first set of docs.

--------

Michael John Muuss ([e-mail]) writes:

>       [ lots of good stuff about BRL-CAD deleted ]
>
> While not "super sophisticated", the load balancing algorithm is
> non-trivial.  It assigns pixel blocks of variable size.  Three
> assignments are outstanding to each worker at any time, to
> pipeline against network delay.  New assignment size is tuned,
> based upon measured past performance (weighted average with variable
> weighting, depending on circumstances).

and Kory responds:

Prt's load balancing is not as sophisticated as BRL-CAD's.  Prt simply
multiplexes the scanlines across the different machines.  The slowest machine
on the network will be the bottle neck.

When I get a chance, I would like to use the same techniques used in BRL-CAD.
I think that it is the best load balancing for a raytracer.

--------

Timings of PRT, by Richard Webb

Here is a snippet of a bug report I sent off to [e-mail] regarding his
"prt1.01" parallel ray tracer.  Note that I ran these test on your NFF SPD
version 2.4.  I'll grab v3.0 and re-run if you think it will make any
difference.  I ran the test on a network of 25 Sun4's (both SparcStation1's
and 1+'s as well as a Solbourne and a few SunServers).  Some machines finished
in about 1/2 of the elapsed time.  The time is as reported by the PRT program.

 TEST     | TIME (mm:ss)
----------+--------------
 balls    | 10:32
 gears    | 16:49
 mountain |  9:27
 rings    | 13:05
 tetra    |  0:59
 tree     |  4:05

It would be nice to have some texturing capability in NFF, but then I guess
that is somewhat too sophisticated for a "Neutral" format.  The SIPP2.0 image
"isy90" marble teapot on a granite base looks very good except there are no
shadows.  I hope someday we will have fast Renderman parallel "cookers"
generating nice compressed video sequences.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Distributed DKB, by Jonas Yngvesson

DDKB (distributed dkb) has the same primitives, shading and input format as
DKB (for obvious reasons).  This includes very nice support for solid
texturing.

Antialiasing differs slightly.  DKB uses an adaptive jittered supersampling,
but in DDKB, each server only has access to one scanline at a time.  This
means adaption is done in the x-direction only.

>    - Output format:
>        - MTV format (24 bit).

Here I have used a mix between the MTV-format an the QRT-format used in DKB.
An MTV-header is followed by the scanlines in QRT-format.  Each line tagged
with its line number (this is because the lines are stored in the order they
are finished by the servers and must be sorted before display).

>Note that prt is a parallel raytracer which spawns off children over
>multiple machines to distribute the work. I have only used it on five
>Sun Sparcstations and have gotten excellent performance. I'm not aware
>of any other public domain parallel raytracers other than VM_pRay
>(which, I believe, runs only on a specific platform).

Yeah!  We have tried DDKB running on 55 sparcstations (then we ran out of file
descriptors, perhaps we should use UDP instead of TCP).  Pretty good
performance indeed.  Unfortunately DKB is not a terribly fast tracer in itself
and I have no time to hack around in it.

I'm not very willing so send this thing out though.  Partly because it is
still only a hack, and partly because I have not contacted David Buck and
asked what he thinks about the whole thing.

[e-mail]
...!uunet!isy.liu.se!jonas-y
University of Linkoping, Sweden

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quadrangle Tessellation, by Christophe Schlick

Why I believe that a quadrangle tessellation is better than a triangle one.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tessellating objects using triangles has become a very popular method in the
ray-tracing world, at least since the classical paper of Snyder & Barr (SIG
87) The classical idea is to start from a parametric surface f(u,v) and
regularly sample the two parameters u and v.  That gives a mesh composed of
quadrangles ABCD where A = f(u, v), B = f(u+du, v), C = f(u+du, v+dv) and D =
f(u, v+dv).  Then the only thing to do is to cut the quadrangle into two
triangles ABC, CDA for instance.


            D ------------- C
             |           _/\
             |         _/   \
             |       _/      \
             |     _/         \
             |   _/            \
             | _/               \
             |/                  \
            A -------------------- B



Using triangles instead of quadrangles has one main advantage:  speed Indeed,
computing the intersection between a ray and a triangle, and getting the
barycentric coordinates (needed for interpolation) is simply a linear system
of two equations.  An optimized algorithm would only take very few floating
point operations (about 8 multiplications after the ray/plane intersection)


But, using triangles instead of quadrangles has also several drawbacks:

First, there a two solutions to decompose a quadrangle into two triangles.
There is no absolute choice, and results will be very different when you take
ABC-CDA instead of DAB-BCD (especially if the curvature of the surface is
high).

But the main drawback of triangles is that the isoparametrics (u constant or v
constant) are not preserved (see figure).  Thus every texture mapping (or
radiosity reading, if you use a radiosity first pass in your system) will be
deformed.


       u=0   u=.5   u=1                   u=0   u=.5   u=1
      D ------------- C                   D ------------- C
    |      \      \                    |      |    _/\
    |      {       \                   |      |  _/   \
    |       \       \                  |      |_/      \
    |       {        \                 |     _/         \
    |        \        \                |   _/  \         \
    |        {         \               | _/     \         \
    |         \         \              |/        \         \
       A -------------------- B          A -------------------- B
       u=0      u=.5        u=1           u=0       u=.5       u=1

      Isoparametric u=.5 using 1 quadrangle and 2 triangles
     "Three is bad, four is good" Dustin Hoffman (in RainMan)


But there is a drawback using quadrangles instead of triangles:  speed Indeed,
computing the intersection and getting the (u,v) parameters of the
intersection point consists in solving a non-linear system of equations.  And
there is a square root.  Yerk!  (see Haines' chapter in "Introduction to Ray
Tracing")

Fortunately the square root can be avoided in many cases!  Tessellating
classical scenes will create a lot of very symphatic quadrangles:  squares,
rectangles, parallelograms and trapezoids.  For instance, tessellating a
surface of revolution (or more generally a surface created by sweeping a curve
around an axis, according to another curve) will create only trapezoids.

For squares, rectangles and parallelograms, (u,v) are given by a linear
system.  For trapezoids, (u,v) are given by a system of one linear equation
and one non- linear equation.  For all that cases, finding directly the
intersection between the ray and ONE quadrangle is LESS COSTLY than finding
the intersection between the ray and TWO triangles.

Another advantage of dealing with quadrangles vs triangles is the memory cost.
There are less primitives to create, to store, to transform, to put in
voxels...

Finally, never forget that for shadow rays, (u,v) are not needed.  Thus using
a simple intersection test (Jordan test) will be faster, for the same result.

--------

reply from Eric Haines:

    Just to be a devil's advocate, I thought I'd bring up some problems
with quadrilaterals versus triangles.  I personally like quadrilaterals,
especially because of the strange shading artifacts from triangles.  However,
we sometimes use triangles, such as in the situation where the quad mesh gives
quadrilaterals that are not totally planar (i.e. the four points don't lie in
a single plane).  This is ill-defined, and so we must triangulate.

    A more important time for triangulation is in animation.  If you use
Gouraud interpolation for shading your primitives, triangles are rotation
invariant, while quadrilaterals are not.  As such, if you make a film of some
object made of quadrilaterals rotating, you can see the quadrilateral shades
change over time.

--------

Christophe's reply:

    Well, non planar quadrilaterals surely can be a problem.  But when
rendering a scene there are so much approximations that are made (on the
illumination model, on the shading technique, on the normal vector
computation, ...)  So, why should it not be allowed to do some approximation
about the geometry and replace a non planar polygon by a planar one?

    The method I use is the following.  When sampling your object along
the u and v coordinates, test about the "planarity" of the quadrangle.  One
technique could be to compute the solid angle subtended by the 4 vertex normal
vectors.  Another technique could be to compute the max distance from a vertex
to the "approximation plane" (AC x BD).  When the solid angle or the max
distance is greater than a given tolerance, then subdivide the quadrangle
(quadtree-like scheme) until the tolerance is reached.  Of course, every one
knows that patch cracking (as defined by Catmull) should occur.  But
practically I you insure that two adjacent quadrangles are at neighboring
levels in the quadtree, cracking can not be visually detected.  (I used that
trick intuitively though I saw recently a paper on it, can't remember
where...)

    Concerning Gouraud shading, rotation invariance of triangles vs
quadrangles is not due to the number of vertex but to the fact that Gouraud
shading use an interpolation in screen space.  I should avoid like the plague
every method that interpolates in screen space!  Effects are well known:
perspective distorsion, rotation dependence, and so on...  I really think that
screen space Gouraud & Phong shading would disappear soon, and be replaced by
their equivalent object space shading.

    I haven't seen papers about that fact, but I'm sure that sure
techniques are already in use.  The idea is to use a dicing technique (as in
the Reyes rendering system) to create micro-quadrangles by sampling a
quadrangle along u and v coordinates.  The number of samples of the u
coordinate is proportional to the length of AB and CD edges (similarly for v
with BC and DA edges) The only thing to do is then to visit every micro-quad
vertex (double loop over u and v), interpolate incrementally either x, y, z,
r, g, b (Gouraud) or x, y, z, nx, ny, nz (Phong) and average samples that fall
in the same pixel.

    The technique isn't more complicate as screen space interpolation, and
can be hardware coded as well (incremental scheme with integer arithmetic) The
ONLY advantage is Gouraud and Phong today, is that they are hardware coded so
outperforming every software algorithm.  But it is perhaps time for chip
designer to realize that there are other --- and better --- shading methods
that support hardware implementation as well!  For instance, when will we see
a chip that does incremental voxel traversal for ray tracing ?

--------

Eric's reply:

    Interesting comments!  We do similar things with non-planar
quadrilaterals, that is, we find if something is not flat by checking its
tolerance from some ideal plane for it.  If the tolerance is noticeable, we
take special measures.

    I agree that it would be nice if Gouraud shading was replaced with
something else.  Renderman micro-facets is certainly one way to go.  The trick
is, what if you are dealing with a surface that (a) does not have a natural
parameterization (that is, [u,v] values are not attached to it) or (b) the
surface has 5 or more vertices?  It's not all that clear how to combine the
various vertex samples to get a proper shade.  The problem is admittedly
ill-defined, but some answers look better than others.  Doing a full weighted
average depending on the distance to all vertices from a given point on the
surface has been proposed, but this takes forever for complex polygons.

    A voxel walker might be a nice hardware addition someday, but I think
the main problem with it is that it's very special purpose.  Most hardware
manufacturers don't want to make highly specialized chips if the market is
small.  Someday I suspect things will get fast enough that ray tracing becomes
popular because it's fairly quick to do - at this point, paradoxically, we'll
probably see specialized hardware that makes ray tracing much faster still.
However, right now I see companies like AT&T Pixel Machines getting little
business for their ray tracers - everyone likes the images, but few seem to
want to get involved making them for real!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Release of Radiance Software & Bug Fixes, by Greg Ward ([e-mail])

I have just put together a new release of Radiance, 1.3.  In addition to the
IES luminaire translator included separately on some tapes, 1.3 contains
several improvements, including faster runtimes for oconv with instances, a
driver for NeWS (and thus SGI's window system), better memory use on some
machines, fisheye views, and a translator for Architrion.  I plan to release
more CAD translators, specifically one for DXF, in the near future.

The new tar file takes up over 36 Mbytes, because it includes compiled
versions for Sun-3, Sun-4, IRIS, DECstation and MacIntosh (running A/UX 2.0),
so you will need to send a large tape to get a copy.  (Of course, you do not
need to load the binaries on your machine if you don't want them.)  As before,
full C source code is provided for all programs.

Send your tapes to:

    Greg Ward
    Lighting Systems Research
    Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
    1 Cyclotron Rd., 90-3111
    Berkeley, CA  94720

--------

Thanks to an astute user, I have learned of a rather serious bug in the IES
luminaire data translator, ies2rad.  It involves the improper conversion of
type B photometry, and some types of asymmetric fixtures.

Anyone who is currently using this program, or plans to use it in the future,
is advised to get the corrected source from me directly.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Radiance Timings on a Stardent, by Eric Ost ([e-mail])

Here is the most recent set of timings which resulted from running the
Radiance batch ray-tracer on tuna.  Note that each rpict.* is a different
instance of the ray-tracer.  The differences are

name        compiled with
rpict.noO --     no optimizations selected
rpict.01  --    -O1, common sub-expression, etc., optimizations performed
rpict.O2  --    -O2, vectorization optimizations performed
rpict.O3  --    -O3, parallelization optimizations performed

Command:
  rpict.X -vp 52.5 6 58 -vd .05 -.6 -.8 -vu 0 1 0 -vh 35 -vv 35 \
      -av .1 .1 .1 -x 1000 -y 1000 scene.oct > scene.raw

System: Stardent Titan-3000
    4 25MhZ R3000 processors
    32 Mb main memory
    file input read from NFS mounted file-system
    file output written to a local-disk file-system

timing batch ray tracer rpict.noO
real     4:14.1
user     4:04.1
sys         8.5
timing batch ray tracer rpict.O1
real     4:14.4
user     4:04.4
sys         8.1
timing batch ray tracer rpict.O2
real     4:27.1
user     4:18.2
sys         6.8
timing batch ray tracer rpict.O3
real     4:15.4
user    16:37.5
sys        17.6

Simply optimized code does not seem to have much advantage over unoptimized
code.  Vectorization appears to slow things down, but running on all 4
processors seems to recover nearly all of the real-time performance that was
lost.  The fact that all of these results (per-processor) are fairly close
probably indicates that to obtain significant benefits from
vectorization/parallelization modification of the implementation itself is
required.  A run-time subroutine/loop histogram obtained using 'prof' has
indicated several instances where in-lining code sequences may improve
performance; though, exactly how much improvement will be obtained remains to
be seen.

--------

Further information from Eric Ost:

Subject: Misc. Radiance 1.3 benchmarks

Program: rpict, version 1.3,
Date: February 22, 1991

This benchmark involves the example 1000x1000 picture described in
../ray/examples/textures as rendered from the associated makefile,
../ray/examples/textures/Makefile.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                      (all times are in seconds)
System                                  Real    User    System
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sun-4/330 (ogre)                      10:27.9  8:10.5       8.5
SGI Personal Iris (pico)              5:41.0  5:26.5       1.6
-IBM RS6000 model 320 (off-site)      4:19.2  4:13.9       0.3
+Stardent Titan-3000 (tuna)     l     4:13.9  4:04.3       7.8
-IBM RS6000 model 540 (off-site)      2:50.3  2:45.2       0.2
*Stardent Titan-3000 (tuna)           1:52.2  1:45.7       4.8
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Legend:
+[Note: The entire image was rendered on 1 processor]
*[Note: Each processor renders 1/4 image, so this is the MAX of all timings.
    The -x, -y, -vv, and -vh parameters were adjusted accordingly.]
-[Note: The IBM timings were performed by our IBM representative off-site.]


System Configurations:

Architecture          Operating System           RAM    Processor      #
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sun-4/330             SunOS Release 4.0.3_CG9    24 MB  20 MhZ SPARC  (1)
SGI Personal Iris     IRIX System V Release 3.2  16 MB  20 MhZ R3000  (1)
Stardent Titan-3000   Unix System V Release 3.0  32 MB  25 MhZ R3000  (4)
IBM RS6000 model 320  Unix System V Release ?    16 MB  20 MhZ RS6000 (1)
IBM RS6000 model 540  Unix System V Release ?    ?? MB  30 MhZ RS6000 (1)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would be happy to answer any questions pertaining to these timings.  In no
way am I suggesting that these timings are the best possible for a given
architecture; rather, they were the ones I obtained and may or may not be
repeatable at another site.  No special fine-tuning was done either to the
system or to Radiance before performing these timings.  Each system was
relatively quiescent and therefore had a minimal load average.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RTSYSTEM Fast Ray Tracer, by Patrick Aalto

The initial post:

I just finished a small demo I have been working on a couple of months.  It
performs real-time ray-tracing and shading (a sort of mixture of them both) on
an IBM PC-compatible computer with VGA graphics.  I find it pretty impressive
(although the environment is pretty simple:  It has a planet, a moon and a
sun).  It runs at 70 frames/second on my 80386/20 Mhz machine.

--------

This RTSYSTEM (Ray-Traced System) is a small demo that uses my new superfast
raytracing algorithms.  It works on register-compatible VGA cards only, using
the non-standard 320x400x256 screen mode.  This mode is highly suitable for
animation, since it features two separate video pages and lots of colors.
Nearly all common VGA-cards work quite well in this mode.

This demo shows a moon orbiting a planet.  The viewer is on a distant moon of
the planet, and is looking 'up' towards the planet and the other moon.  A
distant sun can also be seen from time to time.  It is very easy to run this
demo; just type RTSYSTEM and it starts to run.  After a second or two, a green
number will appear on the bottom- right corner of the screen.  This number
tells you how many frames per second your computer is fast enough to draw.  I
programmed this demo such, that it will just run at the maximum 70
frames/second on my 80386/20 Mhz computer.  A slow VGA-card or a slower CPU
will not reach 70 frames/second, but even a 33 Mhz 80486 - machine will not
run faster than 70 frames/second, since this is the fastest hardware refresh
rate of a VGA display at this resolution.  To quit the demo, just press the
ESC key.

The method of rendering shaded objects usually requires a lot of computation,
since the correct color value has to be computed separately for every single
screen pixel.  The color value of a certain pixel depends on the amount of
light (and it's color) this pixel transmits towards the eye of a viewer.
Since each pixel represents some small portion of some physical object in the
3D image space, the transmitted light can be calculated based on the
properties of this physical object.

When light hits a smooth surface, a portion of it is reflected, and the rest
is transmitted into the object (if the object is even slightly transparent).
The direction of the reflected light is given by the Law of Reflection:  the
angle of the reflection direction r, is equal to the angle of incidence , and
will be in the same plane as the incident vector v and a surface normal vector
N.  Vector r can be determined using vector arithmetics:

      r = v + 2Ncos = v - 2N(vN)

To calculate a dot product of two vectors requires normally 9 multiplications,
1 division and 1 square root.  All this for every pixel in the object!!  (The
planet in the middle of the screen has nearly 2800 pixels, by the way.)  This
demo uses a highly sophisticated technique to calculate the color of a certain
pixel with only one table lookup and one addition per pixel!  Everything is
also done using only integer values (16 and 32 bit), obviously.

Other new techniques in this demo include a 3D-modification of a well-known
Bresenham's circle algorithm to calculate all the X, Y and Z values of a ball
using only integer additions.  (The standard method uses the ball equation
X+Y+Z=R, from which the values for Z-coordinates, for instance, can be
determined if all the other values are known.  This includes a square root and
3 multiplications per every (X,Y) pair.)

Still another new technique is to apply trigonometrics to the 'ray-sphere
intersection' problem.  This does not reduce the needed computations very
much, but gives correct results with much smaller intermediate results (VERY
important when dealing with only integer resolution).

It is interesting to note that even a standard 386 machine with a VGA-card can
perform simplified ray-tracing in realtime.  All it takes is some
optimizations on the algorithms used.

An interesting thing is the optical effect called 'Mach band effect'.  If you
look closely at the planet surface, you will notice all sorts of different
patterns on it, which change rapidly as the sun moves.  These patterns are
merely an optical illusion, caused by the way the retina of our eyes function.
Since there are only 64 different shades of grey (from black to white)
available on a VGA display, the eye is sensitive enough to register the small
change between two neighboring pixels, thus creating a 'pattern' on the
screen.

Studying this demo you can also find out what 'anti-aliasing' means.  Look at
the edge of the planet when it is fully lit.  You will easily see the
'jaggies'.  The planet edge does not appear to be smoothly round, but rather
can easily be seen to be just a collection of pixels.  Now, look at the
day/night border on the planet.  You will not see such jaggies here.  This is
because this borderline is 'anti-aliased'.  The transition from complete black
to complete white is gradual, and thus the eye can not detect individual
pixels.

My new game LineWars II will use some of these superfast rendering techniques.
It will come out sometime this year, I hope...


      Patrick Aalto

Contact:

Internet:    [e-mail]    (account about to expire soon..)
        [e-mail]

--------

I've been told that the demo I mentioned earlier can be found at
chyde.uwasa.fi (sorry, don't have the IP number here now) in the directory
PC/demo.

[This one caused a lot of traffic on the net.  It's a cute demo, though there
aren't all that many rays traced, and a lot of tricks are done to avoid them.
I think this is just fine:  why trace rays when you don't need to?  But it
definitely got people excited when Patrick claimed "real time ray tracing".
--EAH]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DKBTrace Beta Available, by David Buck ([e-mail])

I've placed a new version of DKBTrace onto alfred.ccs.carleton.ca
(134.117.1.1) for beta testing - and for those who just can't wait :-).  The
source files and data files for DKBTrace version 2.10 can be obtained by
anonymous ftp from the above site.  They are in directory
pub/dkbtrace/dkb2.10.  No executables are available at this time.

Abstract:

DKBTrace is a freely-distributable raytrace program that renders quadric
shapes, CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry), and a handful of other primitive
shapes.  Shadows, reflection, refraction, and transparency are also supported.
DKBTrace also allows you to define complex an interesting solid textures such
as wood, marble, "bozo", etc.  The texturing facility has been greatly
enhanced in version 2.10.

NOTE:  The data files for version 2.10 are NOT completely compatible with
       previous versions.  Old data files must be modified to run on the
       new raytracer.

Please report any problems or questions to me at [e-mail].

I'm also starting up three mailing lists for people interested in the
following aspects of DKBTrace:

   - General Questions and Problems with DKBTrace
   - Porting DKBTrace to various platforms
   - Writing a graphical user interface for DKBTrace
      (note: I don't intend to write a graphical user interface, but
         several people have expressed an interest, so I thought I
         should at least maintain a mailing list for these people
         so they can keep in touch).

If you want to be added to any (or all) of these mailing lists, please send me
an EMail message indicating which mailing lists you're interested in.

The final release of version 2.10 should be in one or two weeks.  I will post
another announcement at that time.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Computer Graphics" 2nd Edition Corrections, Software, etc by the Brown
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Papers which are currently available from the Net via anonymous FTP, J. Kouhia
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Last update January 28, 1991

Updates and mails to
Juhana Kouhia
[e-mail] [128.214.6.100]

Put the new papers to
nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]
pub/graphics/papers/Incoming


%K KYRI90
%A George Kyriazis
%T A Study on Architectural Approaches for High Performance Graphics Systems
%I Rensselaer Design Research Center, Technical Report No: 90041
%D September 1990
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/kyri90.ps.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/kyri90.ps.Z

%K MUSG88
%A F. Kenton Musgrave
%T Grid Tracing: Fast Ray Tracing For Height Fields
%J Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-639
%D July, 1988
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/musg88.ms.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/musg88.ps.Z

%K MUSG89a
%A F. Kenton Musgrave
%T Prisms and Rainbows: a Dispersion Model for Computer Graphics
%J Proceedings of the Graphics Interface '89 - Vision Interface '89
%I Canadian Information Processing Society
%C Toronto, Ontario
%P 227-234
%D June, 1989
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/musg89a.ms.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/musg89a.ps.Z

%K MUSG89b
%A F. Kenton Musgrave
%A Craig E. Kolb
%A Robert S. Mace
%T The Synthesis and Rendering of Eroded Fractal Terrains
%J Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH '89 Proceedings)
%V 23
%N 3
%D July 1989
%P 41-50
%Z info on efficiently ray tracing height fields
%K fractal, height fields
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/musg89b.ms.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/musg89b.ps.Z

%K MUUS??
%A M. J. Muuss
%T Excerpts from "Workstations, Networking, Distributed Graphics, and Parallel Processing"
%I BRL Internal Publication  (???)
%D ?????
%O freedom.graphics.cornell.edu [128.84.247.85] pub/RTNews/Muuss.parallel.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/Muuss.parallel.ps.Z

%K MUUS??
%A M. J. Muuss
%A C. M. Kennedy
%T The BRL-CAD Benchmark Test
%I BRL Internal Publication  (???)
%D ?????
%O freedom.graphics.cornell.edu [128.84.247.85] pub/RTNews/Muuss.benchmark.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/Muuss.benchmark.ps.Z

%K SHIR90a
%A Peter Shirley
%T Physically Based Lighting Calculations for Computer Graphics
%I Thesis
%D November 1990
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/shir90a/
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/shirley/

%K SHIR90b
%A Peter Shirley
%T Monte Carlo Method
%I Appendix from the SHIR90a
%D November 1990
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/shir90b.ps.Z

%K WILS91
%A Tom Wilson
%T Ray Tracing Abstracts Survey
%D January 1991
%O weedeater.math.yale.edu [128.113.6.10]  pub/Papers/wils91.1.shar.Z
%O nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]  pub/graphics/papers/wils91.1.ps.Z

======== USENET cullings follow ===============================================

Ray-Cylinder Intersection Tutorial, by Mark VandeWettering

>I am trying to do ray tracing of light through a
>cylinder coming at different angle to the axis
>of the cylinder.  Could some one give me some
>pointers?

Ray cylinder intersection is (conceptually) just as easy as hitting a sphere.
Most of the problems come from clipping the cylinder so it isn't infinite.  I
can think of several ways to do this, but first let me mention that you should
consult Introduction to Ray Tracing edited by Andrew Glassner.  Articles by
Pat Hanrahan and Eric Haines go over most of this stuff.


It's easiest to imagine a unit cylinder formed by rotating the line x = 1 in
the xy plane about the y axis.  The formula for this cylinder is x^2 + z^2 =
1.  If your ray is of the form P + t D, with P and D three tuples, you can
insert the components into the original formula and come up with:

    (px + t dx)^2 + (pz + t dz)^2 - 1 = 0

or    px^2 + 2 t dx px + (t dx)^2 + pz^2 + 2 t dz pz + (t dz)^2

or    (px^2 + pz^2) + 2 t (dx px + dz pz) + t^2 (dx^2 + dz^2)

which you can then solve using the quadratic formula.  If there are no roots,
then there is no intersection.  If there are roots, then these give two t
values along the ray.  Figure out those points using P + t D.  Now, clipping.
We wanted to have a finite cylinder, say within the cube two units on a side
centered at the origin.  Well, gosh, ignore any intersections that occur
outside this box.  Then take the closest one.

Now, to intersect with an arbitrary cylinder, work up a world transformation
matrix that transforms points into the objects coordinate system.  Transform
the ray origin and direction, and voila.  You do need to be careful to rescale
t appropriately, but it's really not all that hard.

You might instead want to implement general quadrics as a primitive, or choose
any one of a number of different ways of doing the above.  Homogeneous
coordinates might make this simpler actually....  Hmmm....  And there is a
geometric argument that can also be used to derive algorithms like this.

Think about it.  It shouldn't be that difficult.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C++ Fractal and Ray Tracing Book, by Fractalman

There's a very nice book called 'Fractal Programming and Ray Tracing with
C++'by Roger T.  Stevens and published by M&T Books.  The book comes with a
disk of sample programs for Zortech C++ but can be modified to be used with
Turbo C++.  The text is very easy to understand and you only need some
rudimentary knowledge of C and computer graphics.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ray/Spline Intersection Reference, by Spencer Thomas

>Can someone please tell me where I can find an algorithm for
>finding the intersection of a ray and a Bezier and/or B-Spline
>patch.

You might look at

Lischinski and Gonczarowski, "Improved techniques for ray tracing parametric
surfaces," Visual Computer, Vol 6, No 3, June 1990, pp 134-152.

Besides having an interesting technique, they refer to most of the other
relevant work.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Superquadric Intersection, by Rick Speer, Michael B. Carter

Here's some material that may be of assistance. The following paper-

  "An Introduction to Ray Tracing", by Roman Kuchkuda, pp. 1039-60 in
  Theoretical Foundations of Computer Graphics and CAD, R. A. Earnshaw,
  Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1988.

is a good introduction to the tracing of superquadrics.  In addition to the
usual overview material it gives actual source code, in C.

This paper-

  "Robust Ray Tracing with Interval Arithmetic", by Don Mitchell, pp.
  68-74 in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface '90, Canadian Infor-
  mation Processing Society (Toronto), 1990.

focuses in particular on root-finding when intersecting a ray with an implicit
surface.  Mathematical and pictorial examples of tracing super- quadrics are
given, along with data on the time-cost of intersections (when run on a
SPARCstation).  There's also some discussion of using the method for CSG.

Finally, this thesis-

  "Implementation of a Ray-Tracing Algorithm for Rendering Superquadric
  Solids", Bruce Edwards, Masters Thesis and Technical Report TR-82018,
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), December 1982.

probably goes into more detail than either of the papers mentioned above.

[Actually, it doesn't:  there's one page on intersecting superquadrics, which
says something like "use Newton's Method" and gives a reference number, which
turns out to be a "private conversation with Alan Barr".  --EAH]

--------

From Michael B. Carter:

     I was just digging through my literature and finally came up with the
reference that was stuck in the back of my mind.  I cannot vouch for the speed
of this method, but here's the ref.

Kalra, Devendra, and Alan H. Barr, "Guaranteed Ray Intersections with
Implicit Surfaces," Computer Graphics, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 1989.

This method uses Lipschitz conditions to intersect ANY implicit surface.  It
always finds the closest (or subsequent) intersection points -- even in badly
behaved functions.  There are also some really neat pictures of blended
objects in the paper.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comments on Interval Arithmetic, by Mark VandeWettering, Don Mitchell

First some comments by Mark:

>>  "Robust Ray Tracing with Interval Arithmetic", by Don Mitchell, pp.
>>  68-74 in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface '90, Canadian Infor-
>>  mation Processing Society (Toronto), 1990. [Rick Speer]
>
>    Interesting paper, though I admit to not having tried its method yet.
>Looks like a great general method for superquadrics and whole families of
>surfaces.  My favorite paper of this proceedings. [Eric Haines]

Very interesting paper, but I believe that the convergence of the method is
quite slow, even slower than bisection.  I coded up a version of it for the
MTV raytracer, and was testing it out when it was clear it was converging VERY
slowly.  If anyone has some hints, or wants to discuss this further, send me
some email.

The reason I was interested in this scheme is that it would allow you to trace
non-linear rays (rays could be generalized to space curves) which would allow
more generic transformations of objects (ala Al Barr).

You can use geometrical properties of the superquadric to figure out
intersections.  There can be at most two intersections in any octant of the
superquad, so a primitive method would be to handle each octant separately and
then use some favorite numerical method (Newtons or bisection) to home in on
the roots.

--------

Don Mitchell responds:

The interval-arithmetic algorithm is a root-isolation algorithm.  It gets used
in combination with root-refinement (something much faster than bisection and
much safer than Newton's method, hopefully).  The speed of convergence depends
a lot on how you are refining intersections.  If you are just performing the
interval algorithm until it converges to a root, that would be very slow and
not really a proper application of the method.

For a benchmark image containing a number of 4th degree algebraic surfaces,
the interval method was about three times slower than a specialized polynomial
solver (e.g., Sturm sequences).  Its hard to compare its run time on
transcendental surfaces, since I don't know any other way except Kalra's
Lipschitz method (described in SIGGRAPH 89).  I think interval arithmetic is
more straightforward than the Lipschitz methods, particularly for surfaces
with singular gradients (like concave superquadrics).  It does not require an
off-line human calculation to derive Lipschitz conditions.

There are also a lot of improvements that I didn't mention (or implemented
later).  For example, there are faster interval multiply algorithms than the
one I gave.  You can do the root isolation algorithm with (F, dF/dt) instead
of (F, grad F).  There are also ways of using the derivative intervals to
narrow the function intervals with the mean-value theorem.

Like a lot of techniques, there is a long journey between theory and
implementation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Platonic Solids, by Alan Paeth

Coordinates for these and for their four-dimensional analogs were published by
HSM Coxeter, first in 1948 in _Regular Polytopes_, pg. 52-53 (Methuen, London)
and again in subsequent revisions; any/all are highly recommended reading. The
table for (quasi) regular 3D polyhedra is transcribed below. I've posted this a
few times already; perhaps a "frequently asked" entry is in order.


            PLATONIC SOLIDS
        (regular and quasi-regular variety,
        Kepler-Poinset star solids omitted)

The orientations minimize the number of distinct coordinates, thereby revealing
both symmetry groups and embedding (eg, tetrahedron in cube in dodecahedron).
Consequently, the latter is depicted resting on an edge (Z taken as up/down).

    SOLID            VERTEX COORDINATES
    -----------      ----------------------------------
    Tetrahedron      (  1,  1,  1), (  1, -1, -1), ( -1,  1, -1), ( -1, -1,  1)
    Cube             (+-1,+-1,+-1)
    Octahedron       (+-1,  0,  0), (  0,+-1,  0), (  0,  0,+-1)
    Cubeoctahedron   (  0,+-1,+-1), (+-1,  0,+-1), (+-1,+-1,  0)
    Icosahedron      (  0,+-p,+-1), (+-1,  0,+-p), (+-p,+-1,  0)
    Dodecahedron     (  0,+-i,+-p), (+-p,  0,+-i), (+-i,+-p,  0), (+-1,+-1,+-1)
    Icosidodecahedron(+-2,  0,  0), (  0,+-2,  0), (  0,  0,+-2), ...
             (+-p,+-i,+-1), (+-1,+-p,+-i), (+-i,+-1,+-p)

    with golden mean: p = (sqrt(5)+1)/2; i = (sqrt(5)-1)/2 = 1/p = p-1

--------

The poster wanted a circumscribing (unit) sphere. Just pick a vertex and
calculate its length (to the origin) and you have R, that sphere's radius.
Normalize (divide all coordinates by R) and the solids are contained by a
unit sphere.

    Alan Paeth
    Computer Graphics Laboratory
    University of Waterloo

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Moon Problems, by Ken Musgrave, Pete Shirley

>  Am I correct in a vague memory I seem to have, that the (Earth's) moon is
>supposedly a near-ideal Lambertian reflector?
>
>  There's something fishy here, methinks.

The moon is not lambertian.  If it were, then a full moon would be bright at
the center of the disk, and fade into black at the edges.  Instead, a full
moon is a fairly uniformly colored disk.  If you assume the lambertian surface
has a scattering probability kcos(theta), you might guess that the moon is
just k (scatters in all directions above the surface with equal
probabilities).  I think this will work for a simple model.

pete


PS-- I saw some angular reflectance curves in some book I can't find.  I think
it was a heat transfer text.  The actual function was pretty funky.

--------

Alain Fournier responds:

As this is one of my favorite trick question about reflection, I'll bite.
Consider the moon when full (that is the sun -the light source- is in the same
direction as the observer -the eye.  It is pretty obvious that it appears
essentially as a disk, that is the reflected light is about of same luminance
all over the visible part of the moon (I ignore the effect of the surface
details such as the maria).  That shows that it is neither a specular
reflector (the center would be a lot brighter than the periphery, nor a
diffuse reflector (the center would be somewhat brighter than the periphery
(try this on your favorite renderer, a perfectly diffuse white sphere
illuminated from the direction of the eye).  So what's going on.  Well, as
most of the computer graphics types (us) ignore, the world is not all between
totally diffuse and totally specular, there are surfaces outside of this.  In
the case of the moon, it so happens that a Phong model (using the expression
loosely) with an exponent of 0.5 for the cosine of the angle normal/light
gives the right appearance of a disk at full moon.  I can find exact
references back in my office, if anybody is interested.  Credit where credit
is due:  Bob Woodham, of UBC, first pointed that out to me, and has worked on
the subject of models for the surface reflectance of the moon (and other
objects in the solar system).

--------

Doug McDonald replies:

Remember that the moon has hills and valleys.  The hills near the terminator
are what one sees, and the actual surface is seen at an angle much less than
90 degrees.  The actual surface itself is sort of Lambertian.  At least when I
actually examined some small (~5 cm) size pieces of the Moon in a lab they
looked rather Lambertian.  On the spot reports agree.

The word "fractal" comes to mind.

--------

Paul Heckbert writes:

As others have mentioned, the moon and other dusty surfaces are not
Lambertian.  Blinn, in the paper cited below, says they follow the
Hapke-Irvine illumination model more closely.

%A James F. Blinn
%T Light Reflection Functions for Simulation of Clouds and Dusty Surfaces
%J Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH '82 Proceedings)
%V 16
%N 3
%D July 1982
%P 21-29
%K shading
%Z Hapke-Irvine illumination model

-------------------------------------

Ken gave another problem with rendering the moon:

>  A very wide-angle view of a scene (i.e., a landscape), with a sphere
>(i.e., a moon) in an extreme corner of the image, sports one very distorted
>sphere in the image, when rendered using the standard virtual-screen model
>for ray tracing.  (See the cover of Jan. '89 IEEE CG&A for an example.)
>
>  Seems that this is a version of the sphere-to-plane mapping problem, and
>therefore inadmissible to a non-distorting solution.
>
>  Can anyone out there prove this conjecture right or wrong, or demonstrate
>some nice workaround?
>

   Yes, this distortion is due to sphere-to-plane mapping.  Actually, the
volume defined by the rays joining every point on the sphere to the center of
projection will be a cone.  Now an intersection of this cone with a plane will
invariably result in an ellipse.  So EVERY sphere, should look like an
ellipsoid in a ray-traced image which uses this model.  But the distortion is
prominent only for spheres located in extreme corner of the scene.

   I also encountered the same problem and would be interested in any method
or projection-model which circumvents this problem.  If the pin-hole camera
model is not a good model for the human eye-brain system then is there any
other model which is more accurate?

Dilip Khandekar

--------

A solution I can see is to have each pixel, instead of having a calculated
position on a viewing plane, have each instead with a calculated horizontal
and vertical angle from the center.  Knowing the angles, one can easily
construct a vector of the appropriate angles to represent this pixel's ray.  I
have not actually implemented this, but it is obvious that this would work, as
when a conventional method is used and the viewing plane is located far from
the eye point, the near-spherical approximation of the plane is good enough to
remove most any distortion.  The reason why a conventional camera does well is
due to the same phenomenon -- it takes a spherical "bunch" of rays and maps
them to the film plane.  If I ever get my present thesis out of the way, I
will attempt to implement this in my version of DBW_Render.

Prem Subrahmanyam

[If I understand this correctly, the idea is doing equal angle spacing of
rays, instead of equal increments on the image plane.  I gave this suggestion
to Ken, then quickly tried it out & found it lacking, as it distorts straight
lines into curves and I forget what else.  See the next entry. --EAH]

--------

This rings a bell in my mind, since I once by mistake in my raytracer did a
purely 'angular' perspective model, i.e. the x axis of the display was really
the angle of the ray in the ground plane, and the 'y' coordinate was the angle
from that plane...  the image looked....  different....  well, anybody
implemented some kind of 'different' perspective model?  Ideally, you would
hook up the user's face to the screen via a telescopic pole, and pull it via
pneumatic cylinders to the correct viewing distance, and the rendering
equation should of course not project onto a plane, but onto a slightly curved
ditto (i.e. a computer monitor).  Now we would hear no more whining about
perspective distorsion....  ;-)

No, seriously, anybody tried twiddling with it?  I did (by mistake) in my
tracer but, well....  nah, not good...  And the problem is, also, that these
twiddlings are only easy to do in raytracers, since linear-things (polygon's
and such) may get non-linear sides when you twiddle (har har for you
Z-buffalos ;-)

Zap Anderssen

--------

You might like to experiment with mimicking the distorting effect of camera
lenses.  Lenses which behave like renderers are very expensive, and are called
something like `flat-plane lenses' (surprise).  Ordinary lenses exhibit
distortion (it's called that in optics books).  Positive distortion makes flat
squares look like pillowcases, negative makes them look weird.  A way to model
positive distortion is to move points in the picture closer to the center.  A
point that starts off at (r, theta) on the image plane in polar co-ordinates
would move to (r', theta) where, in two popular approximations:  r' = r (1 - C
* r * r) r' = r * cos (C * r) for appropriate (small) constants C.  Of course,
I was working with images.  In a ray-tracer, you would distort the directions
of the rays by using the inverse transformation to splay the rays from the
camera outwards.

NO guarantees that it will fix the problem, but it is not a million miles away
from this discussion....

Ian D. Kemmish

--------

If the distorsion is too large, look for conformal mappings.  A conformal
mapping would transform _small_ circles to circles.  The most general
conformal mapping from the sphere to the plane is a stereographic projection
followed by an analytic transformation of the complex plane.  Read the Shaum
book on complex variables, do all the problems and start tinkering :-).

Pierre Asselin,  R&D, Applied Magnetics Corp.

--------

Pictures generated with a standard perspective camera model only look "normal"
if the viewing angle used during rendering matches the angle at which you view
the picture.  If you use a horizontal view angle of theta during perspective
rendering, and view the pictures on a monitor of width w, then if you view the
screen at a distance of d = w/2*cot(theta/2), the picture will not look
distorted.  Here's a little table for a w=14" screen:

                     telephoto     about normal     wide angle

    view angle (degrees), theta        :   10        50        90

    recommended viewing distance, d :   80"        15"        7"

The same argument applies in photography:  shoot a photograph with a standard
(50mm focal length) lens, print it at 8x10" size, say, and it will look pretty
normal when viewed at a distance of about one foot.  If you shoot a picture
with a wide angle lens (24mm, say) and print it at 8x10, you will perceive
"perspective distortion" if you view it at a distance of a foot, but it will
look much less distorted if you hold it close to your face, so that your
viewing angle matches the view angle captured by the lens.

The argument also applies in projection of movies and slides:  there is only
one point in a movie theater from which a viewer will see the same image as
that seen by the camera (i.e. same angle of view).  Theater geometry and the
lenses used for shooting and projection are usually chosen to put that "ideal
viewer position" near the middle of the theater, I imagine.  Assuming perfect
filming and projection and one eye closed, viewers at this ideal position will
not see any distortion artifacts of the projection -- that is, they will not
be able to tell the difference between a projected film and a window into a
3-D scene.  Viewers not at the ideal viewing position, such as those in the
first row, will see the familiar artifacts of perspective "distortion" that
will easily allow them to distinguish between a projected image and a real 3-D
scene.

Another interesting observation about projections is that you can project onto
ANY shape screen you like (planar, spherical, cube corner, curtain, human
torso, ...) and there will be no artifacts of the projection if the
projection lens matches the shooting lens, the viewer is right at the
projector, and the surfaces are properly finished.

---

Related question:  is there a formula relating camera lens focal length and
angle of view?  (I would guess that such a relationship would not be
theoretical, but would be based on practicalities, and would vary from
manufacturer to manufacturer)

Paul Heckbert

--------

In reply to Paul Heckbert:

Focal length and angular field are independent.  For example, you can have a
50mm focal length lens which is a "standard" lens for 35mm photography, or a
50mm wide angle lens for a larger film format.  There are some applications
(enlarging?)  where it is sometimes recommended to use a wide angle lens from
a larger film format in place of a standard lens to assure better field
uniformity.

For a family of lenses designed for a given film size, then of course there
will be a relationship between focal length and field of view, since economics
dictate that the field of view should be no larger than necessary.  Note that
the field does not have a sharply defined size, but that the intensity drops
off continuously at the margins of the field (vignetting).

Jeff Mulligan

--------

In response to Paul's related question:

The relationship is fairly straightforward as I understand it.  Think pyramid
where the width and length of the base are defined by the image dimensions and
the height is given by the focal length.  The formula for the angle is simply:

    angle = 2 * atan(film_size/2 / focal_length)

For 35mm film, whose image dimensions are 34mm by 23mm (approx.), the view
angles for a standard 50mm lens are 37.6 by 25.9 degrees.

Greg Ward

--------

If Ken is rendering an outdoor picture at night with the moon in it, then it
is probably a very wide angle picture, and you are absolutely correct that the
answer is "stick you face closer to the screen and it will look ok."

You state:

>there is only one point in a movie theater from which a viewer will see the
>same image as that seen by the camera (i.e. same angle of view).  Theater
>geometry and the lenses used for shooting and projection are usually
>chosen to put that "ideal viewer position" near the middle of the
>theater, I imagine.

You don't have to imagine.  You are exactly right.  I remember this from
filmmaking books I read in high school.  A 35mm movie camera uses 50mm lenses
as the "normal" lens.  A 35mm film projector uses a 100mm lens so the picture
looks right when you are seated half way between the projector and the screen.
(I don't remember the numbers for "Panavision" or other wide screen systems.)
Use of telephoto or wide angle lenses in the camera produces some distortion
to the viewer at the center of the theater.

This is something very important to film directors.  All films are done this
way.  They understand it.  I have never heard this issue mentioned in the
context of computer graphics.  Maybe no one knows this?

As to your question:

>is there a formula relating camera lens focal length and angle of view?

Such a formula is simple, if the lens has no distortion, and the size and
shape of the film is known.  Where distortion is distortion in the strict
optical aberration sense.  Any optical system is subject to several
aberrations to varying degrees.  These are:

spherical abberation
coma
astigmatism
curvature of field
distortion
longitudinal chromatic aberration
lateral chromatic aberration

Distortion is non-uniform magnification across the field of view.
Magnification usually varies slightly as the angle off the optical axis
varies.  This gives rise to "barrel" (negative) or "pincushion" (positive)
distortion.  Named, for what the image of a square looks like when subjected
to said distortion.

For camera lenses, you can safely assume the distortion is very small except
for wide angle lenses (which is probably the case you were interested in).  I
expect that lens manufacturers would be reluctant to release the actual
numbers describing their lens's performance, since most people couldn't tell
the difference anyway.

For a lens focused at infinity and flat film,
fov = 2 * atan ( film_width / ( 2 * focal_length ) )

The only difference between a distortionless lens and an ideal pinhole camera
with respect to field of view is that if the lens is focused at a finite
distance, replace focal_length in the above formula with:  1/(1/focal_length -
1/object_distance) which is the lens to image (film) distance.

Chuck Grant

--------

>Related question: is there a formula relating camera lens
>focal length and angle of view?

The way this is done for a rectilinear lens (everything one ever encounters
short of optics with high distortions or a fisheye) is based on the size of
the image formed.  In an "ideal" lens -- a pin-hole is a nice first
approximation -- the field is as large as you want -- the negative or film
holder or other physical limitation defines the "field stop".  In a more
complex lens the diameter of some internal element might serve to define the
field stop -- a 50mm lens for a 35mm SLR would probably not be able to produce
a ~250 mm image circle if mounted on a large format camera's lens board.  If
if could it would make a tremendous wide angle!

If the linear field F is given, then you can use the dimensionless relation:

         2 tan(A/2) = F/EFL

to solve for angular field A or effective focal length.

This says (for instance) that a conventional SLR with 43 mm film diagonal (35
mm film is 24 mm x 36 mm; hypot(24,36)~=43) will cover a reasonable, mildly
wide-angle 53 degree (diagonally) angular field with a 43 mm lens installed.

Alan Paeth

--------

So using the (theoretical! yay!) relation

    angle = 2 * atan(film_size/2 / focal_length)

with 35mm film format, which I'm taking to be 34mm wide by 24mm high (Greg
Ward's numbers; Alan Paeth's numbers differ slightly:  24x36), we get the
following correspondence for some common lens focal lengths:

    focal length (mm)    24    35    50    80    200

    horizontal angle (deg)    70.6    51.8    37.6    24.0    9.72

    vertical angle (deg)    51.2    36.4    25.9    16.4    6.58

Paul Heckbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shadow Testing Simplification, by Tom Wilson

Out of nowhere, I have come up with a new (?) speedup (?) technique for
shadow testing in ray tracing.  I don't have the kind of code necessary to
test it.  It is kind of the inverse of a bounding volume:

Consider an expensive-to-intersect object (and for this example, a convex
solid.  I'll generalize later).  Now typically a bounding volume tells you
when a ray misses the object or parts of the objects (for hierarchies).
Eventually you have to intersect the object itself (I'm assuming the object
hasn't been broken down into polygons or whatever).  Now what would be good is
a volume that, if intersected, would tell you the object is hit without
intersecting the object at all (of course it won't always work).  Suppose for
this example we have a bloboid sphere or a megafaced convex polyhedron and we
put a sphere inside the object such that the entire sphere is enclosed in the
real object.  Now if a ray hits the sphere, it definitely hits the object.  If
the ray misses the sphere, it may still hit the object somewhere between the
bounding volume and the "inner tube" volume.  Now this scheme is ideal for
shadow testing, since where the object is hit by the ray is usually
irrelevant.  A "normal" ray needs the intersection point, so this scheme may
not help much (I don't know).

  :::::::::::::            An ugly (and pretty bad) 2D example:
 :       000   :
:      00   00  :          0's define the sphere inside the object :'s
:     0       *--:
:    0         0 -:--
 :   0         0  :  ----
  :   0       0  :       ----<   Shadow ray that hits at *
   ::: 00   00  :
      :::000   :
     ::::::

The object could really be any type of object (not just convex) provided a
sufficient inner tube volume can be constructed.  It's really the same problem
as the bounding volume:  the better the bounding volume (inner tube) the more
rays that are culled as misses (hits).

Is it feasible?  I don't know.  I don't have any complicated-objects code in
my tracer, so I can't test yet (without writing the code first obviously).
Perhaps someone who has the type of setup necessary can incorporate this and
find out (for that matter, has anyone already done it?).  If it's a good
scheme, maybe I should change my thesis 8-) (I really just wanted to get into
the next issue of the RT News).  Please give some feedback.

--------

Reply from Mark VandeWettering:

My guess is that while this would work, it is not necessarily a good thing to
do.  Whether it is an actual speedup is basically a result of how often you
hit the internal bound versus how often you hit the object.  As a crude guess,
we might imagine that the probability of hitting an object is roughly
proportional to its surface area.  Further suppose that our complex object has
surface area = A, and for the sake of argument, spherical.  As a typical
example of our inner bound, lets assume it is a sphere as well, but with
radius 10% smaller.  (This seems pretty tight, I bet you could not do much
better for real objects).

If the object has unit radius, its surface area is 4*Pi.  Our "unbounding
sphere" has surface area .81 * 4 * Pi.  So, we can assume for this argument
that 81% of all rays that penetrate the object will penetrate the inner
volume.

Examining the costs:

    81% of the time: we just intersect the cheap volume
    19% of the time: we need to intersect BOTH volumes to determine
             whether or not the object intersects the ray.


To generalize: let

    C(cheap) be the cost of intersecting the cheap volume
    C(object) be the cost of intersecting the real object
    p be the probability of a ray which hits the object hitting the
      inner cheap bounding volume.

Then, this scheme is a potential speedup if

    p C(cheap) + (1-p) * (C(cheap) + C(object)) < C(object)

Is this a speedup?  I dunno.  One scene in Eric Haines' SPD data base includes
a large gear with 144 edges.  The polygon intersection routine I use is linear
in the number of edges for a polygon.  The majority of rays fall within a disc
which probably accounts for 90% or more of the total area of the face.  I am
pretty sure that a scheme like you suggest would be useful for this case.

But in general?  I dunno.  It really depends on the probability p.  For
most objects, my guess is you might be able to get p = 0.5, which would make
the inequality something like
    C(cheap) + 0.5 * C(object) < C(object)
or
    C(cheap) < 0.5 * C(object)

which actually does seem to make it attractive.

In general, if the ratio of C(cheap)/C(object) = r, then we can solve for
the percentage of inner bounding volumes we need to make this scheme profitable.

p C(cheap) + (1-p) C(cheap) + (1-p) C(object) < C(object)

p C(cheap) + C(cheap) - p C(cheap) + C(object) - p C(object) < C(object)

C(cheap) + C(object) - p C(object) < C(object)

- p C(object) < -C (cheap)

p > r

What this means, if the ratio of speed from cheap to expensive is 1/10, then
we need to have probability greater than 10% to achieve a speedup.

Hmmm.  This probably bears looking into.  Any comments?

--------

John Gregor comments:

Well, to add another data point, the Wavefront software has both a "trace
object" and a "shadow object" associated with each object being rendered.

The trace object is the object used in reflections.  Usually, these objects
are left undefined, or point to a lower complexity, but similarly shaped,
object.  Since shadows and objects appearing as reflections are typically
small and are there to provide visual cues and since Wavefront's running time
is decidedly non-linear to number of polygons in the scene, this is a win.

Also, you can achieve some neat tricks using this.  You can have an object
cast a shadow from a completely different object (e.g. a kitten casting a
lion's shadow) or appearing as something else in mirrors.  Using the same
object with a different offset or scale can lead to some pretty neat effects
occasionally also.

--------

Rick Speer writes:

I'd like to add my $0.02 and note that W.  R.  Franklin examined this idea in
a non-raytracing but similar context in the following paper-

  "3D Geometric Databases using Hierarchies of Inscribing Boxes", pp.  173-80
  in Proceedings of "CMCCS '81" (this is what the Canadian conference now
  known as 'Graphics Interface' used to be called; these volumes are available
  from the Canadian Information Processing Society, Toronto, if anyone's
  interested).

To be more specific, let me quote a bit from the paper's abstract-

  "Hierarchical tree structured databases are an efficient way of representing
   scenes with elaborate detail of varying scales.  Storing a circumscribing
   box around each object is a well known method of testing whether the object
   intersects or obstructs any other objects.  This paper proposes another
   aid:  an inscribing box.  The inbox is a polyhedron that is completely
   contained in the ob- ject.  It should be as large as is easy to
   determine...  The inbox speeds up visibility tests [in the following
   way:...  ] [He concludes,] By combining inboxes and circumboxes, it is
   possible to calculate the visible surfaces of a hierarchical scene in time
   linear in the visible complexity of the scene..."

In his followup message, Mark goes on to note that this issue really needs to
be studied on test scenes using a probabilistic analysis.  I hope it wouldn't
be too immodest of me to note that such an analysis appears in the paper,

  "A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Coherent Ray-tracing",
  L. R. Speer, T. DeRose and B. Barsky, pp. 11-25 in the Proceed-
  ings of Graphics Interface '85, CIPS, Toronto, 1985.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIMD Parallel Ray Tracing, by George Kyriazis, Rick Speer

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Kjartan Emilson) writes:
>
>Does anybody have an algorithm for a massively parallel raytracer,
>which could for example run on a Connection Machine, i.e a machine
>with a 'single instruction - many data' architecture ?
>

The ray-tracing algorithm is usually parallelized ray-at-a-time, which makes
it suitable for MIMD machines.  If you want to run it on an SIMD you have a
problem, since you have to advance all rays at the same time, then filter out
which rays do not need a second reflection, and trace the second level, etc.

I believe that Scott Whitman (at uiuc?) has written a ray-tracer for a SIMD
machine.  I don't remember any details.  Pick up the SIGGraph proceedings for
either '88 or '89 (don't remember which one) on ray-tracing or parallel
computer architectures for computer graphics and you are going to see his name
there.

--------

Rick Speer writes:

A fair amount of literature is beginning to appear on this subject.
The references below should get you started.

  "3D Image Synthesis on the Connection Machine", Franklin C. Crow,
  Gary Demos, Jim Hardy, John McLaughlin and Karl Sims, pp. 254-69
  in Parallel Processing for Computer Vision and Display, P. M. Dew,
  T. R. Heywood and R. A. Earnshaw, Eds., Addison-Wesley, 1989.

  "Ray Tracing on a Connection Machine", H. C. Delaney, pp. 659-67
  in the Proceedings of the 1988 International Conference on Super-
  computing, ACM, July, 1988.

  "Ray-tracing Parallelization on a SIMD/SPMD Machine", PhD. Thesis,
  Marie-Claire Forgue, Laboratoire de Signaux et Systemes, Universite
  de Nice, Nice, France, September, 1988.

  "Distributed Ray Tracing Using an SIMD Processor Array", A N. S.
  Williams, B. F. Buxton and H. Buxton, pp. 703-25 in Theoretical
  Foundations of Computer Graphics and CAD, R. A. Earnshaw, Ed.,
  Springer-Verlag, 1988.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rayscene Animator, by Jari K{hk|nen [sic]

  Thanks to all people who voted for Rayscene.  It's now available from
tolsun.oulu.fi.  Version is 1.3, which the first published version of Rayscene
so docs are not perfect.  But we are working on it...

  The stuff is in directory /pub/rayscene.  Directory also contains two ani-
mations for PC and animation player (Autodesk Animator AAPLAY.EXE).  Those
animations were made with Rayscene and DKB-raytracer.  Enjoy.  Also stuff for
Amiga should be available soon.

  More information from [e-mail] or [e-mail]

--------

  There are a few animation demos, made with the "Rayscene" animation utility
FTPable from tolsun.oulu.fi (128.214.5.6) in the directory
/pub/rayscene/anim.PC (for "Autodesk Animator" on the PC) and in
/pub/rayscene/anim.amiga (for "Movie" on the Amiga).  Here is a short
description of the animation files:

PC-stuff:
aaplay.lzh    Autodesk Animator animation player, freely distributable
rdice.lzh     One mirrored die rounding over chess board
2dice.lzh     Two dice ...
movdice.lzh   same as above, but viewpoint moves
bouncing.lzh  Mirrored ball bouncing over chess board
2balls.lzh    Two mirrored, color-changing balls moving over wavy surface.
          Animation data files created with Rayscene's soon-released utili-
          ty, "Sin". Data file and array file by Panu Hassi. This animation
          (Amiga version) can also be found from anim.amiga
          NOTE: When Sin is released with Rayscene version 1.31, datafile
          and arrayfile are included (and explained too.)
vortdemo.lzh  Combination of three different animations:cylinder, mech and
          Chess. These animations are usually distributed with VORT-tracer.
          NOTE: No Rayscene used. Just for fun...and there seems to be a
          request for raytraced animations...


Amiga:

 At the moment, only 2balls is available. There's going to be more...

 Rayscene was released only a few weeks ago, so there are going to be more
animations here.  Email me for more information.

NOTICE:  Rayscene is now available from iear.arts.rpi.edu also.  (Directory
/pub/graphics/ray/rayscene).  Animations are available only from tolsun...

P.S. DKBTracer was used for rendering.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIPP 2.0 3d Rendering Package, by Jonas Yngvesson and Inge Wallin

We just posted the source code to sipp 2.0 in comp.sources.misc.  It may be a
while before it appears due to moderation, though.  Here is an excerpt from
the README file:

*******************************************************************
         sipp 2.0  --  3d rendering package

         by         Jonas Yngvesson   [e-mail]
            Inge Wallin       [e-mail]

         Linkoping Institute of Technology
         Sweden
*******************************************************************

This is the beta-test release of version 2.0 of SIPP, the SImple Polygon
Processor.  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 Phong interpolation of the surface normals.

The library has an internal database for the objects that is to be rendered.
Objects can be installed in, and removed from, this database at any time.

The library also provides 3-dimensional texture mapping with automatic
interpolation of texture coordinates.  Simple anti-aliasing is performed
through double oversampling.  A scene can be illuminated by an arbitrary
number of light sources.  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.  Images are produced in the Portable Pixmap format
(ppm) for which many utilities exist.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3DDDA Comments, by John Spackman

3d-dda's are prone to many special cases, especially when line slopes approach
zero (so the the inverse line slope, generally used as the increment a la
ARTS) approaches infinity.

A more numerically stable & hence more robust generalization of Bresenham's
algorithm to 3D, which navigates ALL the voxels intersected by the ray is
described in

    `Scene Decompositions for Accelerated Ray Tracing', John Spackman,
    PhD Thesis The University of Bath, UK, 1990. Available as Bath Computer
    Science Technical Report 90/33

Copies can be ordered from Angela Coburn at JANET:  `[e-mail]' or
ARPA:  `[e-mail]'.  Any surface mail should be
addressed to:-

    Angla Coburn
    Mathematical Sciences
    The University of Bath
    Claverton Down
    Bath
    AVON
    BA2 7AY
    UK

However, uniform spatial division is generally wasteful in memory costs, being
non-adaptive.  I prefer octtrees - the above thesis describes an incremental
ray navigation of octtrees & techniques for octtree construction (& indeed for
building Uniform grids).  - `My way's better than everyone elses' :-)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Radiosity Implementation Available via FTP, by Sumant ([e-mail])

I have carried out some Radiosity implementations as part of the investigation
into light equilibrium based rendering methods for my doctoral work.  To test
the implementation, I have used a very simplified scene modeler, BOX.  BOX
supports only box as the modeling primitive and translation and scaling as the
modeling transformation.

I am looking for some good planar surface model data.  Interested netters may
please send me data with the data format.  I will try to provide the input
interface for the sent data formats.

The implementation is available at our FTP site (pub/Rad.0.1.tar.Z at
sbs.ncst.ernet.in ip# 144.16.1.21).  In case of any difficulty in getting from
the FTP site, please send me mail on [e-mail].  I will send the
UUENCODED compressed tar file.

The system has been tested both on SUN and VAX is expected to run on any UNIX
platform.

Further, I invite comments and suggestions from the interested users.


sumant([e-mail])
national centre for software technology,bombay,india

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dirt, by Paul Crowley

I've been thinking about this one, and dirt is a nightmare of the first order.
No, I'm not talking about my personal hygiene...

I was in the kitchen (this _does_ have CG content, bear with me) and I thought
"Wouldn't this be a nice interesting scene to try and render.  The reflection
of the marble back wall against the taps, the kettle, the shadows from the
fluorescent strip lights, the cups...  fun".

Then I looked at the dirt.  It was a pretty clean kitchen, as kitchens go.
There was no mould on the plates, as there is in the kitchen at home (it's my
flatmates fault.  I eat out now as a survival precaution).  But, for example,
there was a whole _variety_ of crumbs on the floor.  Breadcrumbs, little bits
of onion peel, poppy seeds, a discarded match...  anyone looking for
photorealism would have to come up with a description of each of these.  Or
the dirt on the iron - you couldn't just throw some "turbulence" function at
this or fractals because the dirt on irons isn't uniform - you'd have to go
into the physics of how dirt forms on irons.  I'm not sure if that physics is
even fully understood.  There were little pencil marks on the cupboard doors
where the carpenters marked them - if you had been rendering it, would you
have remembered those?  A dribble of water down one side of a cup.  A blue
stain on the carpet whose cause is a mystery to me.

The trouble with dirt is that it's a result of the history of those objects,
and not a static thing.  That chip in the sideboard is in _that_ position
because your flatmate was trying to get a cold sausage out of the fridge, but
she was blind drunk and accidentally drove a waterpipe into it while heading
for the ground at high speed.  You going to write a simulation of that?  Will
you remember to include the little bit of sweater that got caught in the chip
last Tuesday?

Photorealism is _really_ hard.

\/ o\ Paul Crowley [e-mail]
/\__/ Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

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Thomson Digital Images University Donation Program, by Michael Takayama
    ([e-mail])

Thomson Digital Images (TDI) America is offering a special donation program to
qualified educational facilities in the U.S.  and Canada interested in 3D
computer graphics/animation for Industrial Design, Scientific Visualization,
and Animation.  TDI Explore v2.3 software is a high-end workstation-based
package including sophisticated 3D modeling, animation, and rendering
capabilities.  Some features of the software include NURBS modeling, inverse-
kinematics animation, particle-system animation, interactive 3D texture
editing, fast scan-line rendering and ray-tracing.  TDI is a world leader in
the high-end 3D graphics/animation market with an installed base of more than
450 systems.

*******************************************************************************

              UNIVERSITY DONATION PROGRAM
              ---------------------------

If you have ever thought about working with 3D, now is the time.  TDI America
will donate the EXPLORE software to universities and colleges in the United
States and Canada to give students access to the newest developments in the
world of 3D computer animation and graphics.

There are certain criteria which must be adhered to in order for a college/
university to be a successful candidate for this program:

    1.  EXPLORE must be used for research or educational projects.

    2.  The software must be made available to a minimum of 10 students
        per year.

    3.  The software must not be used for commercial purposes without
        the express written permission of TDI America.

    4.  The school must appoint one person who will act as the direct
        contact with TDI America.

    5.  A software maintenance agreement and a software license agreement
        must be signed and returned to TDI America.

Because our university donation program provides software free of charge, the
only costs involved are for maintenance (which includes a one year warranty,
telephone support and free upgrades) and training.

TDI runs on the full range of Silicon Graphics workstations and the IBM RISC
6000.  The Silicon Graphics hardware can be ordered from TDI at our
educational discount prices for your convenience.

To demonstrate your interest in our university donation program, please send
me a letter indicating your intended use of the software, what workstation(s)
you have or would like to purchase, and your time frame.  I will be happy to
put together a price proposal for you, to arrange for a demo, and to discuss
with you the applications of our software for your school.

I look forward to speaking with you about EXPLORE and our donation program.

Sincerely,

Karen Lazar
Director, University Donation Program
TDI America

*******************************************************************************

For more information, contact:

           Karen Lazar
           Director, University Donation Program
           TDI America
           1270 Avenue of the Americas
           Suite 508
           New York, NY 10020
           TEL:  [phone]
           FAX:  [phone]

*******************************************************************************
Michael Takayama                                      email:  [e-mail]
Technical Support Manager
TDI America

--------

>Great initiative. Any ideas to make the donation valid outside USA and Canada,
>like making it worldwide? Whom should I contact to get this information?

TDI America has made this donation offer available only to educational
facilities in the United States and Canada.  For those of you located
elsewhere in North or South America, you can ask if the program can be made
available to you.

Contact:    Karen Lazar [etc...]

For those of you located in Europe, you can try contacting the TDI home office
in Paris, France.  I believe that they have a similar program available in
Europe.

Contact:    Thomson Digital Image
        22 rue Hegesippe-Moreau
        75018 Paris
        FRANCE
        TEL:  [phone]
        FAX:  [phone]

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A Brief Summary of Ray Tracing Related Stuff, Angus Y. Montgomery
    ([e-mail])

I have found (been given/know of) these raytracers (rt's), 3d object file
formats, and object file databases (db's).  If you know of other non-trivial
rt's available please let me know asap.

NOTE:  before madly ftp-ing in these rt's and stuff, check out eric
([e-mail]) haines' rt-related ftp site list for a site near _you_.  his
list is fairly comprehensive and up to date, and is what i used to find most
of the following.


x : before the source means that it is a duplicate of the most
   up-to-date i have downloaded.
xx : dated compared to another.
* this is the _source_ site - the rt from there couldn't be any fresher

rt : (a.k.a and de-acronymation) my source.


   >>>rts(ftp and by request):
art : (a rt, VORT) *|munnari.oz.au
brl : (ballistic research lab) more info at hanauma.stanford.edu
dbw : (dist render, distpro, d.b.wecker) hanauma.stanford.edu x|munnari.oz.au
drt : (distance rt, rayman) iear.arts.rpi.edu
dkb : (d.k.buck) iear.arts.rpi.edu 2.01 (or .10 ?) xx|cs.uoregon.edu (*alfred)
mtv : x|iear.arts.rpi.edu *|cs.uoregon.edu uses nff
ohta : iear.arts.rpi.edu xx|cs.uoregon.edu
pray : (vm_pray) cs.uoregon.edu (*irisa)
prt : (parallel) from comp.graphics/Kory Hamzeh
qrt : (quik) iear.arts.rpi.edu xx|cs.uoregon.edu
rad : from Ning Zhang.
radiance : from Greg Ward
ray : ucsd.edu v3.0 runs off nff :is this an earlier mtv?
rayshade  : xx|iear.arts.rpi.edu cs.uoregon.edu v3.0 (*weedeater)
rpi : (Kyriazis, pxm, vmpxm, gk aargh!) do differ, but in essence the same
   *|iear.arts.rpi.edu v2.0 x|cs.uoregon.edu xx|ucsd.edu


   >>>object databases:
NFF : (neutral file format) gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au
OFF : (object file format) gondwana.ecr.mu.oz.au
poly : polyhedra db
spd v3 : (standard procedural db) cs.uoregon.edu produces NFF


   >>>other formats:
AutoCAD : cad $
GDS things file : (thf) cad
IGES : (initial graphics exchange standard)
architron : (arch) cad
imagine : amiga $
irender : (slp) sgi $
renderman : pixar's
rtk : (rt kernel) $
turbo silver : amiga $
videoscape3D : amiga


   >>>(not what i wanted : trivial or limited)
fritz
good
micro : (uray, DBW_uray) a smaller version of dbw
mini : (paul)
mintrace : (shortest)
nonfinished
obfus
ps
   >>>(not rts)
rayscene
wave

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END OF RTNEWS