Although Tachyon is a very small program, it is relatively
complete and even has a few features often associated with
much larger and more sophisticated ray tracing packages:
- Parallel execution using MPI, POSIX threads, Unix-International threads,
or Microsoft Windows threading APIs
- Run-time display and interactive ray tracing
(on sufficiently fast systems) with built-in support
for Spaceball and SpaceNavigator 6DOF motion controllers for
fly-through navigation
- Ambient occlusion lighting
- Support for 48-bit deep color image formats
- Supersampled antialiasing
- Linear, exponential, and exponential-squared fog
- Perspective, orthographic, and depth-of-field camera projection
modes, with eye-space frustum controls
- Positional, directional, and spot lights, with optional attenuation.
- Provides commonly used geometric objects including
Spheres, Planes, Triangles, Cylinders, Quadrics, and Rings
- Texture mapping (both texture images, and volumetric textures),
with automatic MIP-map generation.
- Direct rendering of volumetric data
- Support for angle-modulated transparency,
limited-ray-depth transparency, edge cueing with outline shading,
and other special shading modes useful for molecular visualization
- Grid-based spatial decomposition for effecient rendering of both
static and time-varying geometry
john.stone@gmail.com