XRay Homepage

     

This page was last updated on Oct 13, 1994, the binaries as well.
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NOTE: This is a pre-release of XRay, there is still a lot to be done.

This Page

Here is the contents of the XRay Homepage:

The Program
The Code
The Binaries for MS-Dos and Windows 3.1
The Pictures
The Bugs
The Future
The Coders, EMail and Annotations

The Program

XRay is a Raytracer for MS-Dos and MS-Windows supporting spheres, planes and quadrics. Various textures (including Mandelbrot, Noise and Turbulence) with a powerfull texture- and color-editor including transparency and lots of other parameters allow the user a creative surface approach. Surface normal disturbing textures such as DNoise or Waves are implemented but not bug-free, yet.

The Dos-Version is just a commandline-controlled Raytracer to process scenes that were created and edited with the Windows-Version, which allows full interaction in editing and tracing objects as well as textures and colortables.

The Code

The tracing algorithm is abstract enough to allow compilation for Dos and Windows, until recently it was no problem to have the same code compiled on SPARC`s, too, it'll be simple to get this running again (fast!). This is because the whole code is in standard ANSI-C, thus machine-independent but NOT optimized on any special architecture.

Max and I started recently with C++ (giving me the creeps seeing that I could have saved a lot of time and fingernails using C++-Objects and -methods for the Object-trees instead of coding them all myself), it would be the very best to port parts of the code to C++. The good thing about C++ is less bugs and more Compiler-support, but speed lacks up to 20%, so this might apply only to the Windows-version, speed is not the main task of this one.

MAYBE we'll rewrite parts of the tracer to 32-bit assembler for x86-machines, hoping to get faster this way (but this is future-future...).

The Binaries

NOTE: These binaries are new, a couple of bugs have been removed and the quality of the pictures is a lot better. There are still bugs and this is still very experimental.

MS-Dos and Windows 3.1, no 80x87 (Oct 13, 93086 bytes)
MS-Dos and Windows 3.1, 80x87 (Oct 13, 84886 bytes)
Sample scenes (Oct 13, 5326 bytes), better ones than before (Oct 4), see the pictures below.
Get the latest version of CTL3D.EXE at ftp.microsoft.com (400 Kbytes)

The Dos/Win-archives carry a documentation to XRay, have a look at it here (Oct 5, 5422 bytes).

The Pictures

The Bugs

These bugs are the ones we know about, please do not forget that this is a pre-pre-release for getting echos and suggestions from you out there on how to go on with XRay.

True Color is recommended, but you can use it with 256 colors as well. Please note that the quality of 256-color pictures is really nothing compared to 24 bit.
Stop the tracer before quitting and before deleting or loading a scene.
Tubes and quadrics are not supported by the editor, yet.

The Future

Here is what we think might come up in future releases of XRay. Feel free to email any suggestions, improvements or whatever else to us.

More objects & textures !

Triangles

easy to trace, hard to edit... :) The main task on triangles is to have powerful editor-support allowing complex generation of objects, editing triangles by hand does not make a lot of sense.

Max had a nice idea for tracing triangles, he experimented and approved his modell, so this will be up next.

Bezier Surfaces

are no problem, I implemented a Bezier-Curve algorithm before, surfaces are simply the Cartesian cross-product of two of these, they'll be in the next version.

Blobs

suck but produce wonderful results, the biggest problem is the representation in the Editor.

Autostereogramms

are major-simple to be implemented upon XRay, since the main quest in Autostereogramms is to retrieve information about the depth of a given point in 3D-space, which is the general approach in XRay, so wait for the next release...

Constructive Solid Geometry

... will be done soon.

NOTE: I don't guarantee for anything in this version regarding CSG, it does not work right.

Animation

is a big thing, I love it, so let's C...

L-Systems

are a grammer-based approach to describe recursive objects such as plants. Nice to generate complex objects, also a nice task.

The Coders

Max Vogelbusch (max@cs.tu-berlin.de) and I (lulli@cs.tu-berlin.de, Christian Schnell) wrote this program, we both started out with the theory together, then he concentrated mostly on the mathematics, I implemented the Windows-Version. Feel free to send email to us if there is anything on your mind concernig this project, we appreciate.

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