On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Don Stewart
jsnow:
A new version of my raytracer is out. It now supports cones, cylinders, disks, boxes, and planes as base primitives (previously it only supported triangles and spheres), as well as transformations of arbitrary objects (rotate, scale, translate) and the CSG operations difference and intersection. Perlin noise and Blinn highlights have been added, as well.
http://syn.cs.pdx.edu/~jsnow/glome/http://syn.cs.pdx.edu/%7Ejsnow/glome/
Glome can parse NFF-format scene files (see http://tog.acm.org/resources/SPD/), but many features are only accessible via raw Haskell, since NFF doesn't support very many kinds of primitives. I included a TestScene.hs file that demonstrates how to create a scene with various kinds of geometry (including a crude attempt at a recursively-defined oak tree) in haskell. There isn't any documentation yet, but many of the primitives have constructors that resemble their equivalents in povray, so anyone familiar with povray's syntax should be able to figure out what's going on.
Very impressive. Did you consider cabalising the Haskell code, so it can be easily distributed from hackage.haskell.org?
I note on the website you say:
"no threading (shared-memory concurrency is not supported by ocaml, in haskell it's buggy)"
Could you elaborate on this? Shared memory concurrency is a sweet spot in Haskell, and heavily utilised, so I think we'd all like to know more details..
Not sure what you need shared memory concurrency for in this case as it seems to be a straightforward parallelism problem (i.e. the different threads would be different pixels, there is no sharing needed). -- Sebastian Sylvan +44(0)7857-300802 UIN: 44640862