What is this tripe?
This is the very weak homepage for mbrt, the little ray tracer that
could. Right now there isn't much to say. mbrt is a ray tracer. It
isn't anywhere near what pov-ray is, but it'd be sweet to get at least
a few users. :)
What does mbrt do?
It traces rays. You can see a bunch of renders, both the good ones
and the buggy ones at my Flickr page. A ray tracer is like a cow in a "joke" my Physics
professor told us once. When a Physicist is asked how much milk the average cow can
hold, the physicisy begins with "To simplify, let us begin by
stating that a cow approximates a perfect sphere and the milk capacity of
said cow approaches the volume of the sphere." :) A ray tracer is
much the same, we make some massively insane approximations and call
it good, then see what we get. Surprisingly, we can get pretty darn
close to what we expect to see in the real world.
What are the goals for mbrt?
They are pretty loosely defined at the moment. We currently have
implemented a plugin system for renderable objects and materials.
This means that it is easy for someone to write the code for detecting
a collision with some renderable object and plug it into mbrt and it
will render just as though it were a built in renderable object. In
addition to nifty little feature, we also plan to make mbrt
networkable. So you can set up render farms of all the old machines
you have lieing around and render an image on the image farm. In
addition we plan on making it multithreaded as well. We would like to
support a wide array of renderable objects and scene descriptions. In
our wildest dreams, mbrt will one day gain a modicum of noteriety and
be useful as a general ray tracer by many people.
Stay Tuned
We have made great progress in the last month. We added the plugin
system, we added support for many types of bumpmaps and texture
mapping, polygons and planes, we added some adaptive supersampling
performance improvements, coverage reports and profiling, and we added
support for reading and writing many image formats. There is a lot
left to do, and we are working feverishly to improve the architecture
and performance as well as advance the feature set as quickly as
possible.
Documentation
mbrt uses Doxygen to generate API documentation, feel free to view the mbrt API online.