{{no footnotes, date=September 2017 Rayshade Raytracer

Rayshade is a software application for ray tracing (

3D rendering 3D rendering is the 3D computer graphics process of converting 3D models into 2D images on a computer. 3D renders may include photorealistic effects or non-photorealistic styles. Rendering methods Rendering is the final process of creati ...

) from a text 3D model description input file into a finished, realistic image. The first version was written between 1987 and 1988 at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. It is written by Craig E. Kolb in C,

yacc Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a lookahead left-to-right rightmost derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a co ...

, and

lex Lex or LEX may refer to: Computing * Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text * LEX (cipher), a stream cipher based on the round transformation of AES * Lex (software), a computer pro ...

. It runs on many different

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

platforms, and was also later ported to the

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

operating system. It does not have a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

Screenshots

Example code

/* Just a ball */ sphere surface ambient .05 .05 .05 diffuse .5 .5 .5 specular .5 .5 .5 specpow 60 reflect .2 1. 0 0 0 /* Scene setup */ eyep 1.7 -3.15 2.6 lookup 0. 0. 0. up 0. 0. 1. light 0.4 0.4 0.4 directional 1. 0. 1. background 1. 1. 1.

External links

Rayshade Homepage at Stanford

Rayshade 4
on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

rayshade-math
converts

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

graphics (complex math drawings) to shaded Rayshade scenes scripts to raytrace Ray tracing (graphics)