Top Document: comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing FAQ (part 2/2) Previous Document: 4 - Utilities and Other Software Next Document: 6 - Frequently Asked Questions See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge ------------------------------ Subject 5.1 - On-line Resources * FAQs All of the FAQs in the USENET heirarchy that are posted to the news.answers newsgroup (as all FAQs should be) are archived at: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/ They are also converted to HTML format and made available at: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/top.html The POV-Ray specific FAQ as available at: http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/povVFAQ/ For those people that are interested in learning about the internal workings of a ray tracer, you should take a look at the newsgroup comp.graphics.algorithms Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). This document describes rotations, intersections, texture mapping, etc. * Ray Tracing News Eric Haines <erich@acm.org> has put together a phenomenal amount of information on ray tracing. This he combines into his Ray Tracing News (RTNews). They are a wealth of information and contain articles, sofware reviews and comparisons, book reviews and lists of everything and anything to do with ray tracing. They are available from many sites in text and/or HTML format; the master site is: http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/RTNews/html/ * Ray Tracing Bibliogaphies In addidtion to the Ray Tracing News, Eric Haines also maintains an up-to-date bibliography of papers relating to ray tracing: http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/bib/ Rick Speer <speer@crl.com> has also done a lot of work in bringing together articles on ray tracing. He maintains a cross-indexed ray tracing bibliography of over 500 articles from 1968 to 1991. These include papers from Siggraph, Graphics Interface, Eurographics, CG International and Ausgraph proceedings. All citations are keyworded and cross-indices are supplied by author and keyword. The bibliography is in the form of a 41 page postscript file which is held at many ftp sites as "speer.raytrace.bib.ps.Z": ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/papers/graphics/ * Ray Tracing Abstracts Tom Wilson <wilson@cs.ucf.edu> has collected over 300 abstracts from ray tracing related papers and books. The collections is available as plain ascii, with Latex and troff formatting programs included. It is available as "rtabs.*" from many sites. http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/bib/ * Graphics Resources List The Graphics Resources List contains a wealth of information on all sorts of computer graphics and visualization information. It has info on mailing lists, plotting packages, ray tracers, other rendering methods, etc. It is available on comp.graphics, comp.answers or archived at various sites. The official archive is ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/graphics/resources-list/ * Paper Bank Project Juhana Kouhia <jk87377@cs.tut.fi> has collected together various technical papers in electronic form. Contact him for more information. * Global Illumination Compendium Phili Dutres effort to bring together most of the useful formulas and equations for global illumination algorithms in computer graphics. http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~phil/GI/ ------------------------------ Subject 5.2 - Other Newsgroups Other newsgroups that may be of interest to you are listed below. - comp.graphics.algorithms - comp.graphics.animation - comp.graphics.apps.alias - comp.graphics.apps.lightwave - comp.graphics.apps.softimage - comp.graphics.apps.wavefront - comp.graphics.misc - comp.graphics.packages.3dstudio - comp.graphics.rendering.misc - comp.graphics.rendering.renderman - comp.graphics.visualization ------------------------------ Subject 5.3 - Books Title: Ray Tracing Creations Authors: Drew Wells and Chris Young Publisher: The Waite Group Year: 1993 ISBN: 1-878739-27-1 This book has been written by Drew Wells and Chris Young, two of the original developers of POV-Ray, as a user and reference manual for POV-Ray. Coming in at 573 pages, it's an excellent publication with literally hundreds of stunning colour and monochrome pictures. The only drawback with the book is that it deals with POV-Ray version 1.0 which is dated now that version 3.0 is out, but it is still a very worthwhile investment for any POV-Ray user. Title: Ray Tracing Worlds with POV-Ray Authors: Alexander Enzmann, Lutz Kretzschmar, and Chris Young Publisher: The Waite Group Year: 1994 ISBN: 1-878739-64-6 Raytracing Worlds with POV-Ray is written with the intermediate to advanced POV-Ray user in mind. This book comes with POV-Ray 2.2, Moray, and several additional tools for MS-DOS on diskette. It assumes you have a basic knowledge of POV-Ray, which you can easily get by reading the POV-Ray documentation. An review of the book is available at: http://www.povray.org/povzine/povzine1/raytrace.html Title: Adventures in Ray Tracing Author: Alfonso Hermida Publisher: Que Corp. Year: 1993 ISBN: 1-56529-555-2 This book looks at Alexander Enzmann's ray tracer, Polyray (see 1 - Ray Tracing Software), and the author's own modelling system, POVCAD which runs under MS Windows. The two work well together. The content of the book is good and, as in the previous book, there are many excellent illustrations and pictures. There are a few errors in the book, but Alfonso has produced an errata list which is available from: ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/books/erratas/ Title: Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C Authors: Christopher Watkins, Stephen Coy, Mark Finlay Publisher: M&T Books Year: 1992 ISBN: 1-55851-247-0 Provided with this book is source code for a ray tracer called Bob which is a subset of Stephen Coy's full-blown ray tracer, Vivid (see 1 - Ray Tracing Software). Title: Making Movies on Your PC Authors: David K. Mason and Alexander Enzmann Publisher: The Waite Group Year: 1993 ISBN: 1-878739-41-7 Focusing on animation, this book is by David K. Mason, author of many utilities including DTA - Dave's Targa Animator, and Alexander Enzmann, author of Polyray. These tools, and others, are used to show how animations can be created on a PC. It's a 210 page book that is laid out well with ample illustrations. Title: An Introduction to Ray Tracing Authors: Andrew Glassner (ed) Publisher: Academic Press Year: 1989 ISBN: 1-12-286160-4 An Introduction to Ray Tracing has its main focus on the programming techniques, implementation, and theoretical concepts in writing a ray tracer. It has been described as one of the two required books for ray tracing programmers (the other being Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++ by Nicholas Wilt) . It contains chapters from many of the pioneers of ray tracing. Eratta is available at: http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/books/erratas/IntroToRT Title: Graphics Gems Author: Andrew Glassner (ed) Publisher: Academic Press Year: 1990 ISBN: 0122861663 Graphics Gems is a series of technical books devoted to computer graphics algorithms, with editors from the who's-who of computer graphics. While not specific to ray tracing, these books do contain a lot of optimized ray tracing algorithms and code. The books are very worthwhile to get if you are a graphics programmer (great covers too)! You can get the source code examples for all volumes at: http://www.acm.org/tog/GraphicsGems/ Title: Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++ Author: Nicholas Wilt Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Year: 1993 ISBN: 0471-304-158 This book takes the reader through many issues involved with the development of a ray tracer in C++. The last section of the book deals with OORT, a class library for ray tracing. It does not implement any input language or user interface but uses C++ calls to the library. This is intuitive, due to the nature of C++, and extremely powerful as all the normal constructs of C/C++ such as loops, conditionals, etc., are available. It's definately a programmer's book and some knowledge of graphics programming is assumed. Because of this, the nature of the book is quite technical and can be hard going. Eric Haines sums it up well: ------------------------------ Subject 5.4 - Image Libraries The POV-Ray home site has a good collection of ray traced images. The site maintains a "Hall of Fame" for outstanding images created with POV-Ray: ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Hall-Of-Fame/ http://www.povray.org/hof/ The Rayshade home page also has an amazing collection of images made with this renderer and some custom additions at: http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~cek/rayshade/gallery/gallery.html ------------------------------ Subject 5.5 - Texture Libraries There are a couple of initiatives under way to create a database of POV-Ray textures. People who have any textures at all from POV-Ray are encouraged to send textures to the maintainers of the archives so that everyone can benefit from the time you spent on creating the textures. A searchable index maintained by Rene Schwietzke is available at: http://texlib.povray.org/ There is a library of building related textures (bricks, stone, etc), for use as image maps at: ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/packages/architec/Textures/ Other Resources http://www.elektrobar.com/lux/textures.html http://gasa.dcea.fct.unl.pt/carita/textures.html http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/textures/aindex.html ------------------------------ Subject 5.6 - Internet Ray Tracing Competition Starting in November 1994, Matt Kruse started a raytracing competition for the readers of c.g.r.r, and the internet in general. What started out small grew into a great forum for incredible raytraced images on the net. Open to all artists using raytracing as their medium, the competition attracted artists of all skill levels, but more importantly served as a showcase of what is possible, and allowed everyone to learn a few tricks and techniques. Winners invariably pushed the envelope of what people thought possible, and winning was important as much for the admiration of the other artists as it was for the prizes. Because of its popularity, Matt could not keep up with the work needed to run the competition to his satisfaction, and the contest closed one year after it started. Fortunately, a new group of people, Bill Marrs, Chip Richards, and Michael J Hammel, collectively known as the IRTC Admin Team, have picked up the flame with the blessing of Matt, and the new Internet Ray Tracing Competition has begun. You can find out more about the competition, and see the images as each competition finishes at: http://www.irtc.org/ [204.140.166.85] ftp://ftp.irtc.org/ [204.140.166.85] ftp://ftp.lorax.ml.org/pub/irtc/ [128.2.97.15] http://38.153.3.18/IRTC/ ftp://38.153.3.18/IRTC/ This competition is something to look forward to every other month as the pictures become available for viewing. There have been spectacular images for the first year of competitions. The complete set of submitted images, as well as many of the source files are now available on CD-ROM. See http://www.aussie.org/products/ for more details. User Contributions:Top Document: comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing FAQ (part 2/2) Previous Document: 4 - Utilities and Other Software Next Document: 6 - Frequently Asked Questions Part1 - Part2 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: mk@cyrus.ruhr.de
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
|
Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: