--- "Casteel, Don" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm curious why you want to develop a ray tracer yourself? There are plenty
> of superb freeware raytracers available, and they would be much faster than
> anything Java could do.
>
> If you need Java to develop a scene you could write an application which
> would output a scene description file that could be rendered with an
> available ray tracer.
>
> The most popular freeware ray tracer is POV, my particular favorite is
> Polyray. Both easily handle reflective and refractive surfaces you can even
> adjust the IOR for refraction (Lucite -> glass -> diamond)
Do they handle non-linear (spherical, conical...) reflective surfaces?
> If you insist on creating your own, the POV source is freely available, if
> you wanted to spend the time to dig into it and learn how they did it in C++
> then figure out how you can make Java do it, I'm sure it can be done.
>
> Again however you won't be producing images in Java3D. You'll end up using
> the vecmath and a lot of the Java3D objects for tracing each ray, but in the
> end you'll have a pixel color that you'll draw to a 2D canvas. You won't, in
> my opinion, need to use any of the primitives or shape nodes of any kind.
> You'll trace each ray mathematically using the functions of your "objects"
> to determine the pixel color.
>
> Hope this helps
Yes, it does, thanks. My original thought was that I'd be able to use j3d to
load in a VRML scene description into some kind of object representation. I
wouldn't be using j3d to render the scene, since j3d doesn't do ray tracing.
But I'd like to use java to write the ray-tracer, and be able to use a good 3D
library so I won't have to reinvent the wheel. The fun part is writing the
ray-tracing code. But if I have to create my own scene-description mechanism,
then it becomes tedious.
Terren
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com
===========================================================================
To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body
of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
