Compiled by Eric Haines erich@acm.org . Opinions expressed are mine.

All contents are copyright (c) 1995, all rights reserved by the individual authors

Archive locations: anonymous FTP at princeton.edu:/pub/Graphics/RTNews, wuarchive.wustl.edu:/graphics/graphics/ray/RTNews, and many others.

You may also want to check out the Ray Tracing News issue guide and the ray tracing FAQ.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Contest: Name that Area Ratio
• Ray Tracing Roundup
• On-Line Computer Science Bibliography Collection,
by Alf-Christian Achilles
• Comments on RTNv8n1,
by Alexander Enzmann
• Dore' Now Free, and Dore' Mailing List,
by Len Wanger
• Fooling Around,
by Eric Haines
• Beware of VIDEA!
by W. Purgathofer, E. Groeller, M. Feda
• Still More on Optical Ray Tracing,
by Dan Reiley
• Raytracing and 3D Studio,
by Michael Adams and Brian Hoffman
• Testing SIPP versus Raytracers under DOS,
by Alexander Enzmann

Introduction

        Thursday, 5:15 pm (the room opens at 5) to 6:45
        Westin Bonaventure (the HQ hotel), in the San Fernando room

The timing and place are such that you can catch it while moseying from the convention center (where things wrap up around 5 pm) to the papers/panels reception at 7 pm (about 2 blocks walk from the Westin).

The Roundtable is where anyone interested in ray tracing to gather and connect names with faces. There are usually around 50 people who show up, we go around the room and say names and what we're up to nowadays, then break up and schmooze. The gathering started as a way for researchers to talk about ideas. It has evolved into a general gathering for anyone interested in 3D rendering to meet like minded souls.

____

OK, so I've been trying to ignore the net and whatnot and get some Real Work (tm) done, but people keep coming out with some amazing things. Not too many new free ray tracers of note, but Chris Cason's POV ray tracing CD is finally out. The Graphics Gems V code is available online, beating the book's publication by a few months. There's now a free OpenGL implementation for Unix boxes and MS Windows, and the Dore' object oriented library has been made available for free [see RTNews2]. SGI provides a free parser for reading and traversing VRML (and there are three or more free/beta viewers out there right now). Glassner's magnum opus (so far), _Digital Image Synthesis_, is finally out [briefly reviewed back in RTNv7n3].

In other news, ACM Transactions on Graphics has a new Editor in Chief, Andrew Glassner. He and I have been working on WWW pages for ACM TOG, and the basics are finally ready: check out http://www.acm.org/pubs/tog/ . I consider the most significant page the Reviewing Guidelines, as here Andrew gives a sense of where he wants to see TOG go, and it's significantly different than the current public perception; please read it if you do research (and even if you don't). There are other pages of interest, such as the Editors page, where you can put names to faces for a number of graphics researchers; there are also links to what they are researching. I spent a fair amount of time on the Resources links, which point to software and other data of particular interest to researchers. I tried to limit my choices to significant tools and sites and pointers to other links of interest. I have also tried to avoid duplication of previous efforts, such as material already in computer graphics related FAQs. There is definitely a 3D and ray tracing bias to some of these pages; I look to you all to point out other resources you consider significant and worth adding.

I am also helping cobble up some WWW pages for my company. You might want to check out http://www.eye.com/ sometime; I plan on having my own homepage someday, with pointers to where to access the most recent version of materials I have on the net (papers, SPD package, RT News archives, etc) - in the meantime check out "Freebies". Buy a few thousand dollars worth of products when you visit, please.

____

Best WWW graphics site I've seen this year:

        http://ftp.std.com/homepages/stevec/NTA/intro.html

____

Quote for the issue:

"Digital technology is the universal solvent of intellectual property rights." - Copyright 1995, Tom Parmenter

Tom writes:

The "universal solvent" quote I picked up from a speech by "an Apple fellow" in 1988. It conformed to a long-held conviction of mine, so I polished it and adopted it, that is, appropriated it. Putting it next to a probably bogus copyright claim is my twist.

and I continue the tradition by ripping it out of his e-mag, _Desperado_.

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Contest: Name that Area Ratio

Take a crack at this problem: given the set of all arbitrary triangles (i.e. 3 random dots, anywhere on a 2D plane) and a 2D bounding box around each, what is the average ratio of the area covered by the triangle vs. the box? The answer is actually a useful thing to know, if you're trying to design an optimal point-in-polygon test and you know the point is inside the bounding box. I'll be interested in your answer and how you got to it. The prize for the best (decided in some arbitrary fashion) correct answer: a copy of Chris Cason's POV ray tracing CD ROM (see the Roundup) or a copy of one of Syndesis' CD ROMs (kindly donated by John Foust) (see RTNv6n2, RTNv6n3, and RTNv8n1).

I'd also be interested in the answer to the same question for four arbitrary points on a plane and the average area of the polygon vs. the box area. For maximal bonus points (redeemable for plastic spiders at video arcades around the country) what's this ratio for four arbitrary points which form a polygon which doesn't overlap (i.e. doesn't make an hourglass shape)? Finally, what about the set of all convex four pointed polygons? I haven't a clue what the answers are to these four-point questions, but would be interested to know them. Answers backed by theory are best, but having your PC churn out the answer by doing a bazillion iterations and averaging the results is OK, too (aka Monte Carlo).

back to contents

Ray Tracing Roundup

I hope to review this CD in a future issue (or better yet would like to get a review from someone else, perhaps you [holographic hand pointing at you here]).

________

The code distribution for _Graphics Gems V_, ed. Alan Paeth, Academic Press, 1995 is available on-line at:

ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/Graphics/GraphicsGems/GemsV and ftp://ftp-graphics.stanford.edu/pub/Graphics/GraphicsGems/GemsV

As usual, if you find any errata, let me know as I'm the archivist for the on-line Gems code.

The book is not out yet (it'll be at SIGGRAPH 95). Also, this *is* the last in the Graphics Gems series; there are ideas floating around of other possible books, but I know of nothing definite.

________

Avalon Moved

Viewpoint Datalabs has taken over the management of the Avalon site, which contains many free 3D models and related software. They appear to be cleaning up the structure and adding a nice WWW layer. Check it out at:

        http://www.datalabs.com/avalon.html

________

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/seas/eecs/Research/Graphics/ProcTexCourse/ is the web page for my class.

[If you like procedural textures (or even if you don't), check this out! Also, it has an all-important link to the history of textures WWW pages, which all computer graphicists should study carefully. - EAH]

-- Ken Musgrave (musgrave@seas.gwu.edu)

________

For an undergrad class I'm teaching, I wrote up some notes on ray-polygon and ray-quadric intersection testing. They can be found at the URL

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/anim-ph/463.95/pub/www/notes.toc.html

on the World Wide Web, in both Postscript and Latex forms. This five-page document focuses primarily on intersection of rays with convex polygons. I've described a method there that is easier to implement (though probably slightly slower) than the standard approach of projecting to 2-D.

The other notes in this collection are:

1. Raster Images
2. Point Processing of Images
3. Image Filtering
4. Warping and Morphing
5. Aliasing
6. Antialiasing and Related Issues
7. Discrete Fourier Transforms and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) Algorithm
8. Image Compression
9. Glossary of Signal Processing Terms
10. Visibility and Ray Casting
11. Ray-Polygon and Ray-Quadric Intersection Testing
12. Painter's & Z-Buffer Algorithms and Polygon Rendering
13. Spatial Subdivision
14. Light and Color
15. Reflection and Transmission
16. Recursive Ray Tracing
17. Texture Mapping
18. Global Illumination and Radiosity
19. Review of Rendering

Notes #10 discusses the generation of rays through a given
pixel given only the screen coordinates of the pixel and the 4x4
world space to screen space transformation matrix, but no camera parameters
-- something I don't recall seeing published elsewhere.

-- Paul Heckbert (ph@cs.cmu.edu)

________

Global illumination researchers should find this site of interest:

http://safran.imag.fr/Membres/Francois.Sillion/globillum.html

-- Francois Sillion (Francois.Sillion@imag.fr)

________

I added a partial postscript version of my master's thesis to my home page. [an excellent primer on various aspects of texture mapping. Other papers and software are here, too. -EAH]

If you go to my home page, http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs/user/ph/www/heckbert.html

you'll find that in my papers list I've just now put in links to the UC Berkeley versions, and also, at the end of my papers list, I've got a link to the top level UC Berkeley tech reports collection.

If you want to poke around a bit, try the "list of individuals..." link at the bottom of my home page for pointers to a few other interesting people and places.

-- Paul Heckbert (ph@cs.cmu.edu)

________

[In response to the question "does anyone know where I can get a mesh of a person?"]

This is more data than you probably wanted, but I thought I would mention that the complete data for the male "Visible Human" (as seen at Vol. Vis. '94) is now available -- this includes CAT, MRI and cryosections at 1 millimeter intervals. The URL

        http://www.nlm.nih.gov/extramural_research.dir/visible_human.html

has a complete description of the data and how to get it. You need to fill out forms about what you are going to do with the data -- for example whether you are going to develop a commercial product. I don't think you have to pay anything unless you want them to send you data on tape. They also have a few sample images.

-- Holly E Rushmeier (holly@cam.nist.gov)

________

3D Graphics Programming in Windows, by Philip Taylor Jr., Addison-Wesley, 1994, comes with disk, isbn: 0-201-60882-0, 877 pages, $49.95 US

An interesting book: if you're interested in writing 3D related programs for MS Windows, this is a good place to start. He describes how to make a 3D modeler, a vector rendering library, a ray tracer, and many other design elements. The bias is towards pure Windows code (I prefer Visual C++), but this is a minor part of the presentation; the elements presented are generally applicable to any Windows environment program and, to a lesser extent, interactive graphics programming in general. Contact Phil Taylor (philt@kaleida.com) for more info.

________

A demonstration version of the HELIOS Radiosity Renderer for MS-Windows 3.1 is now available from ftp://avalon1.viewpoint.com/avalon/misc/helios2a.zip . This program is an authorized version of the HELIOS radiosity renderer presented in the book:

Ashdown, I. Radiosity: A Programmer's Perspective. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

ftp://avalon1.viewpoint.com/avalon/misc/helios2a.txt

-- Ian Ashdown (Ledalite@mindlink.bc.ca)

________

For those of you interested in rendering participating media, you might want to check out

    http://www.sandia.gov/html/frame/NSFFinal_with_graphics_1.html

which is

"The Use of High-Performance Computing to Solve Participating Media Radiative Heat Transfer Problems - Results of an NSF Workshop"

-- Holly Rushmeier (holly@cam.nist.gov)

________

I think taxonomies are a useful guide for people who want to use an existing method for their application. I'm prejudiced, but I think a useful taxonomy has been developed in the NIST Guide to Available Mathematical software (http://gams.nist.gov/). It helps people sift through all the various software repositories and find code that will solve their problem.

-- Holly Rushmeier (holly@cam.nist.gov)

________

VRML

This is the newest hot scene description language for describing 3D models for transmission on the WWW. There's been a lot of hype, but hey it's a lot more interesting than client/server models or all that other computer goop out there. SGI has provided a free C++ parser, qvlib, to read VRML and traverse the database. There are a number of free VRML browsers out there, some are commercial betas, others are just free.

I personally rely on two WWW pages for info on VRML:

An excellent nexus for pointers to just about every VRML resource is:

        http://www.sdsc.edu/vrml/

The FAQ is maintained by Jan Hardenbergh (jch@nell.oki.com):

        http://www.oki.com/vrml/VRML_FAQ.html

There is also a mailing list (actually, a few), which generate much much mail; see the FAQ for details.

My fave VRML model is on the:

        http://hyperreal.com/~mpesce/samhain.wrl

site, go to "The space is HERE!". It's by Mark Pesce, one of the driving forces behind VRML (he's at http://hyperreal.com/~mpesce/ if you want the bigger picture). It's cruiseable on a Windows machine, and it's a great model to show to your grandmother to confirm that all those things she read about the net in _Time_ *are* true.

________

3D File Converter

A pretty dang good 3D file converter by Keith Rule for MS Windows can be had from:

        http://skexix.europa.com/~keithr/

It started out as a program to convert into POV-Ray format files (Keith also write a good POV-Ray zine), but now does conversion for quite a few formats, including subsets of DXF, 3DS, OBJ, NFF, raw, and now VRML.

________

MESA

Mesa is an OpenGL-like (read: essentially OpenGL but missing a very small bit of functionality, and getting closer by the day) package by Brian Paul (brianp@ssec.wisc.edu) which is free, provides source code, and runs on Unix boxes and now MS Windows, the Mac, and the Amiga (!). Of course, it does not take advantage of any native graphics accelerators, so you won't want to use it on your Reality Engine, but for the rest of us it's a cheap alternative. For example, one university uses it on a number of their educational machines, saving them licensing costs. The site:

        http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~brianp/Mesa.html

From what I have seen on the mailing list, its rendering speed compares favorably with other commercial software-only implementations, and in some cases has features that the commercial products do not (e.g. double buffering).

To subscribe to the Mesa mailing list, send the following message to the address listserv@iqm.unicamp.br

        subs mesa <your name>
        set mesa mail ack

For example:

        subs mesa Brian Paul
        set mesa mail ack

____

If you need the advantages of a name brand, Evans and Sutherland is releasing a version of their OpenGL library on Linux for something like $79. Write wstout@es.com for information. The version was evidently made with time donated by E&S employees (!?).

____

[or if you're more of a GL fan, there's this, which I don't know anything about. -EAH]

I have been writing a GL library on the side for the last few years. It is now available for beta testing from:

   http://www.nas.nasa.gov/

and go to "Software" and hit "libglto".

Be aware that this library is currently under some restrictions. It belongs to the United States government and hence is not in the public domain. It is only available to sites in the US and the recipients must agree to certain restrictions. This is all explained on the WWW page.

This library currently implements approximately 269 GL commands and drives any generic X display. It has been tested on SGIs, Suns, IBMs, HPs and PCs. All these machines were running some flavor of UNIX.

[and one serious caveat:]

The "zbuffer" is not a true zbuffer, I merely sort the polygons. It would be a trivial matter to add real zbuffering, but there would be a performance penalty.

-- David C. Yip (dyip@nas.nasa.gov),
        business card http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~dyip

________

The Tessellation Times is an excellent free weekly e-zine by Columbine, Inc, the people who make _3D Artist_ magazine [see RTNv7n1]. You can view it from

http://www.3dartist.com/tess/tessmain.htm
or
http://www.lightside.com/~dani/ (an excellent site in general)

________

The Daily Spectrum: Morph's Outpost Interactive Media News is a daily (!) e-zine of multimedia news. There are usually a few articles each week of interest to people involved commercial computer graphics. Get it at

http://www.mecklerweb.com:80/netday/morph/daily.htm

http://www.macromedia.com/Industry/hot.industry.news.html

http://www.lightside.com/3dsite/cgi/publications/daily-spectrum/index.html

________

Another WWW site of interest

http://aloha.com/~sharky (CG links, Imagine related stuff, many other pointers) [now a dead link, 7/28/97]

________

You can now reach my BBS, The Graphics Alternative, via Telnet at telnet://tgax.com

-- Adam Shiffman (adams@ccnet.com)

________

To all who've visited the Rendering Plant BBS and found the connection poor, I've added a new line. So far, the new line seems to be pretty excellent. Drop me a line if you have any trouble with the bbs.

The new number is 816-525-8362. It's a 14.4 modem

The old line is 816-525-5614. It's a 28.8.

[Jim has a large collection of 3D Studio meshes and other material, much of it not available elsewhere on the net. -EAH]

-- Jim Lammers (trinity@tyrell.net)

________

My entire BBS is available as well as a couple of CD's worth of stuff. Only 2 users allowed to FTP at a time. Sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to allow tons of users to FTP all at the same time.

FTP to ftp://graphics.rent.com or WWW to http://graphics.rent.com

-- Bob Lindabury (bobl@graphics.rent.com)

________

Mail me if you want a comprehensive list of 3D books and references with reviews. [See RTNv7n4 for an early version of this list. It's become quite extensive and now covers many more books; the text file is 1300 lines long. Check it out. -EAH]

-- Brian Hook (bwh@netcom2.netcom.com)

________

WWW pages for SIRDS are at http://h2.ph.man.ac.uk/gareth/sirds.html.

-- Peter Chang (peterc@a3.ph.man.ac.uk)

________

Geomview, Interactive View For 3-D Geometric Objects

The Geometry Center announces the availability of release 1.5 of Geomview. Geomview is an interactive viewer for 3-D geometric objects. It allows users to view and manipulate these objects via the mouse, the keyboard, and through an interpreted command language. This release includes versions for SGI (using GL graphics), NeXTStep (requires NeXTStep version 3.0 or higher), and generic Xlib graphics. Precompiled binaries are available for SGI, NeXT (m68k/intel/hppa), Sun4, HP, Linux, IBM RS/6000 and DEC Alpha platforms. The source code is also available. These distributions are all in ftp://ftp.geom.umn.edu/pub/software/geomview For more details, and for a list of changes since previous releases of Geomview, see the README file in that same directory.

Geomview is part of an effort at the Geometry Center to provide interactive 3D graphics which is well-suited for mathematics visualization. In addition, Geomview is extensible and can serve as a general-purpose tool. Its functionality can be extended in an almost unlimited fashion by external modules or programs.

For more information, go to URL:
        http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/download/geomview.html

[I lost the author of this notice. -EAH]

________

3D Studio Related

To become a member of the 3D Studio mailing list you must send a mail message to the address:

        majordomo@autodesk.com

In the body of the message enter:

subscribe 3dstudio

____

I have found some sites of interest:

3D studio:
http://homepage.eznet.net./~frac/3ds.html
http://www.halcyon.com/asllc/3dstudio.html
ftp://ftp.mcs.com/mcsnet.users/bcleach/3dstudio
ftp://www.pp.orst.edu/
ftp://ftp.csn.net/Schreiber/              - Schreiber Instruments (IPAS)

Other:
http://delphi.beckman.uiuc.edu:80/softimage/
http://wavefront.wti.com

-- Jonni Berckhan (via marcus.almqvist@p5.panacea.ct.se)

____

>In what site (ftp), could I find example meshes for 3D-Studio?

Try anonymous ftp at 129.131.1.225. There is 3D geometry there in various formats, including DXF. It's the UCLA Visualization Center.

- Colin de Vries (colinv@microsoft.com)

____

Hmm, if you haven't noticed yet, I have a 3D Studio page at: http://ksc.au.ac.th:8000/3ds.html [wups, stale link, left in in case it reappears. -EAH]

Mostly things I snarfed off here or off other places on the net, if you have a web page with 3ds related stuff on it, let me know and I can put a link in.

-- FRiC (frac@ksc.au.ac.th)

________

I'd just like to let you know that there is a user mailing-list for trueSpace.

        mail truespace-request@cs.uregina.ca
        help

to get information about subscribing.

Net sites for TrueSpace related materials include:

        ftp://ftp.netnet.net/pub/mirrors/truespace
        http://www.netnet.net/users/truespace

-- Shane Davison (daviso@cs.uregina.ca)

________

Some of our students have been using Lightscape here at UCLA. There has been some nice stuff done with this software; you can see for yourself - point your web browser to http://www.gsaup.ucla.edu/ and I did a test mpeg movie of a student Lightscape animation at my site: http://www.vizlab.ucla.edu/ .

-- Lance Barker (lance@VIZLAB.UCLA.EDU)

________

LIBTIFF mailing list

[Libtiff is an excellent TIFF read/write library, with full source and no "copyleft" restrictions or suchlike. -EAH]

To join the mailing list, do:

        mail tiff-request@sgi.com
        subscribe

-- Sam Leffler (sam@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com)

________

I just found a mailing list where people exchange ideas about Photoshop. photshop@bgu.edu.

You have to send your e-mail to: listproc2@bgu.edu
Body text should be: subscribe photshop first_name last_name

-- Francois Pilon (FRANCOIS@mksinfo.qc.ca)

____

Photoshop-related anonymous ftp sites:

ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/HSC/Kais_Power_Tips - Kai's Power Tips & Tricks

ftp://export.acs.cmu.edu/pub/PSarch - Kai's Power Tips & Tricks, misc. shareware plug-ins, demos, etc.

ftp://uxa.ecn.bgu.edu/pub/archive/photshop and ftp://uxa.ecn.bgu.edu/Photoshop-Files - Misc. shareware plug-ins, demos, etc.

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/hsc - Adobe files & info

________

I've set up a temporary FTP server for VFD.ZIP:

        ftp://www.bi.umist.ac.uk/graphics/vfd/vfd.zip

This will create FLI / AVI / MPEG from many types of images.

-- Simon Oliver (Simon.Oliver@umist.ac.uk)

________

Fli as screen saver for Windows 3.1?

> Is there a way to use flics as screensaver for windows, preferably a
> shareware program or something ?

Niklas Mellegard (niklas@ida.his.se) writes:

I got a tip from someone (I seem to have deleted that mail, but thanx anyway) to download a file called vuesav22.zip, but it turned out only to show *.bmp *.jpg & *.gif. BUT by coincidence I came across a file called mrphss.zip (Morphics Screen Saver) which did just the job. I believe I found it on ftp.luth.se/pub/msdos/win3/desktop or something like that. I had however some trouble getting it to start, it's a long story but I finally succeed. If anyone have trouble, just send my a mail and I'll tell you about it.

John Rankin (jrankin@titan.ds.boeing.com) writes:

Check on CI$ for a shareware pkg called SSFLIC.ZIP from a Dutch Co called NT Systems. Written by Bert Steenbeeke. We went thru the search for a "clean" pkg last Autumn and saw most of the half-baked offerings before finding the above! It's *so* much more elegant and easy to install. It uses AAplay.DLL and two other small files - 182k in all - a mere drop in Wdoze terms and the best feature is it's idiot-proof instl.... a real necessity for the OS. If you can't find it drop a note. Bert wants $35.00 to register!

________

For those with ATI graphics cards, ATI drivers can be had via FTP from ftp://atitech.ca , also ATI has a website:http://www.atitech.ca .

-- Joe Feldman (joef@IslandNet.com)

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On-Line Computer Science Bibliography Collection, by Alf-Christian Achilles (achilles@ira.uka.de)

I maintain a computer science bibliography collection at

        http://www.ira.uka.de/ftp/ira/bibliography/index.html

that consists of about 600 mirrored bibliographies that have been converted to a standardized BibTeX layout. It contains about 330,000 references to conference papers, journal articles and technical reports in various areas of computer science. The bibliography collection is mirrored all over the world and at two WWW sites alone the number of daily accesses exceeds 2000. The references contained in the bibliographies are also searchable at three sites with four different search interfaces.

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Comments on RTNv8n1, by Alexander Enzmann (Alexander_Enzmann@star9gate.mitre.org)

Larry Gritz stated, "On the other hand, you can't get true displacements with BMRT (or any ray tracer)". I'm not sure I completely agree here. Polyray does displacements of surfaces by splitting them into triangles and then moving vertices. These triangles can be rendered with raytracing, zbuffer rendering, or ASCII output (of triangle vertices).

Is this "true" displacement? Perhaps not, but if you instruct Polyray to dice the prims up fine enough, you really can't see the difference. The cost is the storage and preprocessing of a big bag of triangles. Even bucket oriented renderer like Photorealistic RenderMan has to dice its prims into polygons, and will have occasions where many are active at once, it just doesn't have to have them for the entire world (to account for off-screen reflections, etc.)

The other comment I have is on your discussion on scanline rendering, "Also, as far as CSG - forget it trying to get the polygonal version of a CSG model...". I agree with what I think you were saying, however there is a solution that doesn't require a complete b-rep description of your CSG model.

The approach I took in Polyray to rendering CSG during scanline rendering is to do the CSG in image space. As each pixel is generated, you use the interpolated world (or object) coordinates as a parameter to the normal CSG inside/outside routines. The result is pretty good, and can usually be made as good as you want by subdividing prims more finely. The two major drawbacks: you are doing CSG evaluations on parts of a prim that will never appear on the screen, and you don't have a nice polygonal model that can be exported to something else.

____

Eric Haines replied:

Interesting: so what happens exactly when I, say, subtract a sphere from the corner of a cube? I render the cube and indeed the points in the sphere disappear. I then render, what, the inside of the sphere and test its points for inclusion within the cube, right? Hmmm, so you basically have to make sure you do the CSG inside/outside test but making sure you don't use the object itself being rendered to affect the inside/outside determination, right? Good one, I like it! Probably not the fastest thing on two wheels, but it beats some of the various multi-buffer schemes I've seen for both memory and simplicity. In (what I call) multi-buffer, you render all the CSG objects in a model and then sort out the details at each pixel by checking the set of valid spans for that pixel and finding the closest point - cuts down on in/out tests (there are none), but a nasty thing to program and manage memory.

____

Alexander replies:

You just render the sphere. Since I'm not doing backface culling, I only need one routine to turn the sphere into polys. The only time I look at the normal is for shading.

I know perfectly well that culling speeds things up, however I'd rather know about both sides of an object. That way if you chop a hole in a primitive (clipping rather than CSG difference) you see the back wall rather than having a total hole.

>> but making sure you don't use the object itself being rendered to
>> affect the inside/outside

Turns out that's pretty easy. Each object has a pointer to the CSG tree it is sitting in. As you render an object you do inside/outside by walking up the tree. Since you know which branch you came from, you can avoid doing comparisons against yourself.

>> Probably not the fastest thing on two wheels,

Nope, but then I was more concerned with making it work than making it go as fast as possible. I've got a renderer that can produce consistent images using either raytracing or scanline rendering for a huge variety of primitives. I'll leave the superfast polygon rendering to the commercial folks. [I don't even have tables for doing sin/cos, always found more interesting things to work on.]

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Dore' Now Free, and Dore' Mailing List, by Len Wanger (wanger@intsim.com)

The list is called "dore", and has been installed on UCSD's automated listserver. The purpose of the list is to be a focal point for Dore community and to be a forum for Dore related questions, bug reports, patches, extensions, etc.

To subscribe send a mail message to listserv@sdsc.edu.

With the command line: "ADD dore"

For those who are unfamiliar with Dore, the package is commercial quality (having been a commercial product for several years) and has support for traditional polygonal rendering as well as ray tracing and radiosity.

Current archive sites with dore 6.0 are:

sites:
        ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/dore
        ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/do/dore
        ftp://sunsite.unc.edu ?
        ftp://ftp.cdrom.com ?

files:
        pdore-6.0.tar.Z
        pdore_note.txt

____

Abstract of Package (submitted to sunsite)
===================

Title: Dore' API (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment) Version: 6.0 Description: Dore' is a powerful 3D graphics subroutine library. It provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating graphics applications. It is also easy to use, portable, and extendable. This version has interfaces/drivers to X11, PEX, IrisGL, OpenGL, Postscript and more. It has been ported onto most unix systems, including Linux and FreeBSD. It has also been ported to Windows NT 3.5. Author(s): The key authors and contributors from a long list of illustrious but evanescent computer companies are listed below:

                     - Companies -
                    Dana Computer
                    Ardent Computer
                    Stardent Computer
                    Kubota Pacific Computer Inc.
                    Kubota Graphics Corporation

                     - Key Authors/Contributors -
                    Michael Kaplan
                    Mark Patrick
                    Bruce Borden
                    Kevin Weiler
                    Dan McLachlan
                    Helga Thorvaldsdottir
                    Carolyn Houle
                    Lori Whippler

Maintained-by:
Maintained-at:     sunsite.unc.edu, ftp.cdrom.com
Platforms:         SunOS, OSF/1, Irix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows NT
Copying-Policy:    Public Domain
Keywords:          Dore', 2D & 3D Graphics API, 3D Graphics subroutine library

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Fooling Around, by Eric Haines

In the rendering/animation front, there's a lot to explore with non-real rendering: serious stuff like "make the image look like it was hand-drawn and shaded, automatically" and silly stuff like "what does it look like if I put a totally wacky shading model in place?" Or what can be done when you ray trace and barely hit an object - make it partially transparent there, or change its color, or maybe you make it black there and everything then looks like a cartoon, or...? Who knows? We need more people to goof off with shading models and intersection methods and so on - mostly a waste of time, but there are probably some interesting methods, so far undiscovered, that can be done by varying our assumptions.

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Beware of VIDEA! by W. Purgathofer (wpu@stellaris.cg.tuwien.ac.at), E. Groeller, M. Feda

The submitted abstracts

We decided to write more than one crazy abstract to make sure that an acceptance cannot be interpreted as accident and so we tried different types of weird papers proposals. The first of four abstracts we produced was simply a completely irrelevant topic, namely how to create footprints on the walls of public rooms. It includes several statements that every reviewer must recognize as joke. The complete text is given in abstract 1.

Extended abstract 1:
----
The Footprint Function for the Realistic Texturing of Public Room Walls

Abstract
Today's radiosity methods are able to produce nearly perfect light distributions for interior rooms. Unrealistic appearance now mainly is due to missing texturing of the walls. One important feature of public room walls are footprints in the lower areas. This paper presents a set of simple functions to easily generate a class of footprint textures for such applications. Different randomization techniques ensure the realistic appearance of the results. This technique is of increasing importance for the visualization of architectural objects in the future. Keywords realism, rendering, textures, footprints

Introduction
Today's radiosity methods are able to produce nearly perfect light distributions of interior rooms. Unrealistic appearance now mainly is due to missing texturing of the walls. One important feature of public room walls are footprints in the lower areas.

The Footprint Function
The basic footprint function is a combination of trivial, i.e. easy to implement, parametric functions. The footprint is divided into a ball and a heel which can have independent sole textures. The sizes are chosen such that a simulation of shoe sizes 35 to 42 for women profiles and 39 to 46 for men profiles is performed.

Randomization Techniques
Distribution techniques will be presented that ensure that the lower part of the wall contains significantly more footprints than the higher parts. Especially, no footprints must occur above a certain threshold height, due to physiological limitations of the human being. Additionally, random functions will take care that most footprints remain incomplete and vary in color and shape.

Results
Preliminary investigations are encouraging. As we have not implemented the new method yet, there are no concrete results, yet. The final paper might include images.

Conclusion
A footprint function for the realistic imaging of walls is presented. Details of all functions are given to ensure an easy implementation for the reader.

References
to be included in the final paper.
----
(end extended abstract 1)

The second abstract describes a correct method which makes no sense at all, that is how to render interior rooms without light. Obviously, the resulting image will be completely black. This was written as in abstract 2.

Extended abstract 2:
----
Efficient Radiosity for Daylight Simulation in Closed Environments

Introduction
Radiosity is a useful tool for architects and lighting engineers to simulate illumination in the interior of buildings. Unfortunately, the computation time for radiosity is very high. However, radiosity algorithms can take advantage of special scene properties of specific classes of environments. Exploiting the additional information about the scene structure of a particular class can decrease the computation time significantly. The aim of this paper is to speed up the radiosity computation for the class of closed environments without artificial light sources.

Two Restrictions on the Scene Structure
The first restriction on the scene is that it is closed. The reason for this restriction is the fact that radiosity is based upon the energy conservation principle, that means that at any time the amount of emitted energy equals the amount of absorbed energy plus the amount of energy leaving the scene. In closed scenes no energy leaves the scene, thus simplifying the radiosity computation. However, this restriction does not impose problems, because radiosity is mostly used for interior scenes. The second restriction is that only daylight can be considered. Radiosity algorithms solve a set of equations, where the radiosities of patches are the unknowns and the emissions are the constant terms. In conventional radiosity all patches are allowed to emit light, i.e. to be an artificial light source. If we assume that no patch has emission, we only have to consider daylight. This allows the use of very efficient solution methods known in numerical mathematics for the set of equations. The second restriction does not limit the range of applications too much as well, because in most cases architects are interested in visualizing their design with daylight conditions.

Mathematical Foundation of the New Method
Details will be described in the final paper.

Benefits
The new method reduces the computation time of both the radiosity evaluation and of image generation. Images can be generated at interactive rates even for very complex scenes, making the method suitable for walk-throughs and VR-applications. Since numerical techniques are mainly replaced by analytical formulas, no aliasing effects appear.

Conclusion and Future Work
The development of radiosity algorithms for special classes of scenes is a promising field of future research. Such algorithms are significantly faster and possibly more accurate than non-specialized algorithms.
----
(end extended abstract 2)

These first two productions have at least a little bit the structure of a scientific paper abstract. What we also wanted to try was, if VIDEA would accept its own text as abstract. So we copied the complete introduction from the "Call for Papers" and gave this abstract the title of the conference. Minor changes were only made like changing the word "conference" to "paper". The result is given in abstract 3.

[see site http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~wp/videa.html for abstract]

Last but not least we decided to produce an abstract without any content, just complete nonsense. So we took a dictionary of information processing words and selected randomly some 40 phrases from there and joined them together to a fantastically technical sounding text. The given reference is, of course, the utilized dictionary! We had much fun with abstract 4.

[see site http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~wp/videa.html for abstract]

Results
All abstracts were sent to the conference in November 1994 and on January 14th, 1995 we received the results. All four abstract have been "reviewed and provisionally accepted"!

[More follows; also, in case you've seen only this posting (which got passed around far and wide--I received about 7 copies from different people), there is a response from the conference organizers and a reply by W. Purgathofer et al. -EAH]

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Still More on Optical Ray Tracing, by Dan Reiley (primo@moontarz.nuance.com)

Based on the shareware and low-budget raytracing software I have seen, you are better off using the y-nu raytracing chart.

Both the programs and the y-nu take a few hours to learn. Both have output that is at least a little bit cryptic the first time it is seen. Howver, if you use the y-nu you will learn something universal; with the program you will learn something particular to that program. The y-nu raytracing chart can be set up easily in a spreadsheet like Excel. It is essentially an adaptation of the matrix method for paraxial raytracing, with simple equations for what happens to a ray's height between optical surfaces and what happens to its slope at optical surfaces. By tracing two rays (usually the chief ray and the marginal ray) the system can be well- characterized.

I learned the y-nu raytracing chart from Modern Optical Engineering by Donald O'Shea, which has a clear and self-contained chapter on it.

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Raytracing and 3D Studio, by Michael Adams (msadams@netcom.com) and Brian Hoffman (bhoffman@mail.valverde.edu)

Now I have heard the arguments that raytracers are too slow, and I agree they are for most animations. For stills, however, they can make good sense. You simply cannot get the realistic reflections that a raytracer produces with 3D Studio's reflection mapping. That is not to say that 3D Studio's rendering engine is bad. In fact, it is excellent.

I ran some tests over the weekend with POVRAY 2.2 (ftp alfred.ccs.carleton.ca in the /pub/raytrace/POV-RAY directory). There is a utility to convert 3D Studio 3DS files to POV files (from ftp://avalon1.viewpoint.com/avalon/utils/converters/3dspov18.zip). It is not perfect. It will not convert textures, and I ran into some bugs with certain models. It did work well enough to convince me that a raytracer can enhance certain scenes considerably. Here is what I found:

1) Raytracing at the highest quality setting is about 7 times slower than 3D Studio's metal shading with shadows and reflections turned on.

2) Raytracing improves scenes with many highly reflecting surfaces.

3) Raytracing can add a lot of detail to a scene through its calculations of reflections and refractions with no additional work by the model builder.

4) The 3D Studio renderer output looked as good as the raytracer output with scenes with few reflective surfaces, or by virtue of geometry, had single level reflections. That, to me, says a lot about the high quality of 3D Studio's rendering engine.

5) Some scenes had surprising results with the raytracer, because we are not use to seeing them, such as multilevel reflections of shadows. Yes, it is more realistic, and therefore, you have to be a little more "realistic" with reflectivity settings for materials.

I also did a non-scientific test with a friend by asking her which images she liked better, the 3D Studio rendered images, or the POV raytraced images. I took identical models and rendered them with both systems. She knows nothing about computer graphics. Invariably, the raytraced images were preferred. Her comments were "there is more to them". Presumably, this means she saw more reflection nuances in the raytraced images.

In conclusion, the speed of the raytracer is slow, but not so slow that I would not use it for final output of stills. We all have time when our computers are sitting idly doing nothing (POVRAY also lets you interrupt rendering part way and resume it later).

____

Brian Hoffman (bhoffman@mail.valverde.edu) comments:

The argument that raytracing is too slow to use for animation is not always correct. It's important to remember that raytracing is not an all-or-nothing proposition. First, the only things in a scene that are candidates for raytracing are reflective objects, objects with refractive transparency, and shadows. These elements may take up only a small portion of a given scene. Secondly, you may not need to raytrace every reflective object, every transparent object, or every shadow in a scene.

That's why I like the approach Lightwave uses. First you have separate global toggles for enabling/disabling raytracing for reflection, refraction, and shadows. In addition there are also local per surface and per light controls. If you select a reflection map for a reflective surface, then that surface's reflections will not be raytraced. If you do not select a reflection map, the reflections will be raytraced. Similarly, refraction for a surface with transparency will only be raytraced if an index of refraction other than 1.0 is assigned to it. The shadow types for spotlights can be set to be raytraced, shadow mapped, or none.

These features allow you to mix raytraced methods with mapping methods in the same scene. You can have a glass ball with mapped reflection, raytraced refraction, and raytraced shadows. Another glass object might have traced reflection, non-refractive transparency, and shadow-mapped shadows. And so on.

With selective application of raytracing to limited parts of a scene, it is sometimes possible to get an increase in realism without paying a huge penalty in rendering time. (Of course, it is possible to really explode your rendering times. Example: A close view of a glass sphere with raytraced refraction, and raytraced reflections for the exterior AND interior surfaces. Inner surface raytraced reflections combined with raytraced refraction causes rendering times to go through the roof. I've learned to raytrace only exterior surface reflections in these situations.)

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Testing SIPP versus Raytracers under DOS, by Alexander Enzmann (Alexander_Enzmann@star9gate.mitre.org)

If you are really interested in benchmarks of various raytracers, Eric Haines has published them in Ray Tracing News on various occasions. This is simply an evaluation of how a scanline renderer compares to a renderer that implements both zbuffer rendering and raytracing. (Polyray is in the middle of the pack as far as speed of Share/Freeware raytracers goes. I've got numbers if anyone cares.)

In order to have the images at least somewhat resemble each other, a custom shader was written for the SIPP file that does a simple horizon based color change. If the Z component of the reflection of the view direction about the normal was above 0 then the sky color was used, else the ground color. This gives a first order approximation to reflections. The actual code for the shader is given below (along with the corresponding one used for Polyray when performing zbuffer renderering).

I can make available an image that shows the result of each of the six runs shown below if people want it.

Without shadows:

    SIPP 3.1       Polyray v1.8/    Polyray v1.8/
                   ZBuffer          raytrace
    ---------------------------------------------
       29.0          62.1             61.0

With shadows:

    SIPP 3.1       Polyray v1.8     Polyray v1.8       Polyray v1.8
                   ZBuffer &        Zbuffer & ray      Raytracing only
                   Shadowmaps       traced shadows
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
       52.9         159.3            118.2              128.2

For this particular test case, my conclusions are:

1. SIPP is faster but really hogs memory.
2. Raytracing isn't all that slow compared to scanline rendering. A 4x difference between SIPP without shadows and Polyray with recursive raytracing is pretty reasonable.
3. Polyray's zbuffer renderer is wasting a lot of time shading pixels more than once.
4. Polyray is also wasting quite a bit of time generating shadow maps, writing them to disc, then reading them back in.
5. With a little effort, scanline rendering can give good results. However, with even less effort a raytracer gives much better results.

Other notes:

Sphereflake is kinda nasty to a polygon renderer due to the large number of polygons required for a smooth looking sphere. Tetra or Gears might have been a better choice. (Any takers?)

SIPP consistently clipped the ground polygon one pixel short of the right and bottom edges of the image, leaving two lines with the color of the background.

256x256 shadow maps look pretty crummy. By upping them to 512x512 and running in a DOS box under Windows to get Virtual memory (remember I'm using a 4Mb machine), they were improved but still had noticable artifacts. This had a severe impact on runtime with all the swapping going on.

The sizes for each sphere in SIPP were: 30 for the big ball, 15 for the next level, and 6 for the smallest balls. SIPP appears to use a standard lat/long tessellation of the spheres. (The "size" in these cases refers to the number of subdivisions around the equator. It's a parameter to SIPP when you create a sphere. The change in # of sides was necessary so I wouldn't run out of memory from too many polygons. It also is a hack at adaptive subdivision based on screen size.)

Both the SIPP library and Polyray v1.8 were compiled with the Watcom 10.0 C compiler for D0S 32 bit protected mode. The machine used was a 486DX/33 with 4Mb of RAM.

SIPP images were renderered at 257x257 and rescaled to 256x256. This is the standard filter/corner mode of antialiasing specified in the SPD benchmarks. An external program was used to rescale the SIPP image since it has only supersampling. Shadowmaps were generated at 256x256, also due to memory limitations.

Lights were turned into spot lights in order to support the generation of shadowmaps. Since Polyray uses square lights when a depth map is used, a spot light function was defined to make them match the ones used in SIPP.

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