Features of the Rings Ray Tracer

Rings is still in beta, so many of the features it should have aren't in yet. Although its not really fully useful, it still works okay.

UI Features Include:

- Look and feel options.
- Surface and Light info panels.
- Advanced hieracical grouping of Surface objects.
- Render options dialog.
- Render timer and progress monitor.

Rendering Features Include:

- Color rendering (ray tracing).
- Anti-aliasing (super sampling).
- Lighting model with support for ambient, directional ambient, and point light sources.
- Distance attenuation for point light sources.
- Two built in texture: stripe and image.
- Four built in shaders: diffuse, highlight, reflection, and refraction (not quite working).

Surface/Modeling Features Include:

- Custom layered transformations (scale, rotate, translate, etc.).

Supported Surface Types:

- Primitive Sphere, Cone, Cylinder, Plane.
- Triangles and Triangle Meshes.
- Polynomial Surfaces.

Supported Data Storage Methods:

- XML Encoding of Scene/Surface data.
- PPM, PIX and JPEG encoding of image data.
- RAW triangle data import.

In The Future...

Items in bold will be included in the next major release.

UI Features Will Include:

- Object picking/dragging.
- Wireframe view for tessellated surfaces.

Rendering Features Will Include:

- Refraction model for dielectric surfaces.
- Optimization with BSP trees.

Surface/Modeling Features Will Include:

- Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG).

Surfaces That Will Be Supported:

- Primitive Cube, Tourus.
- Basic spliens and parametric patches.
- NURBS surfaces.

Data Storage Methods That Will Be Supported:

- Scene/Surface data export/import in OBJ.

Requirements of the Ray Tracer

To run the ray tracer you will need the JRE/JDK 1.4 or higher.