[Jmol-users] Tachyon (was Re: what is Jmol for?

[Ralf S. <ra...@ar...>]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 7:21 PM, Robert Hanson wrote:

> The tachyon tracer idea is a good one -- just show me the format.

According to its man page, which is here:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/karmic/man1/tachyon.1.html

...it can read its own format, described here officially:
http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/papers/tachyon.pdf

and also the AC3D format (a modeller):
http://www.inivis.com/ac3d/man/ac3dfileformat.html

and also the NFF scene format, which is here:
http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cap5725/spring2003/nff.html

By implementing AC3D output you could at the same time
support that program, read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC3D

However, the tachyon web page states "It also supports less common features such as HDR image output, ambient occlusion lighting, and support for various triangle mesh and volumetric texture formats beneficial for molecular visualization", but this isn't in the PDF above. Maybe ambient occlusion lighting is entirely done with command line options, but I'm not sure about the other things.

Regards,

Ralf Stephan
http://www.ark.in-berlin.de
pub   1024D/C5114CB2 2009-06-07 [expires: 2011-06-06]
      Key fingerprint = 76AE 0D21 C06C CBF9 24F8  7835 1809 DE97 C511 4CB2