GRT Raytracer


About GRT

GRT is a Common Lisp raytracing system, developed on CMUCL and SBCL, but should be easy to port to other Common Lisp implementations as well.

GRT is currently in early development stage, with 0.1 freshly released. 0.2 is expected to be out in August / September 2003.

News

Time Dilation (2003-07-16)

Release of GRT 0.2 has been delayed (the release was orginally planned for early June).

To make a long story short: we decided to move over to a shader-based architecture now instead of later. Refactoring takes time.

The new architecture is going to make some "advanced" features like variable reflection trivial, but the real payoff is in the modularity and the ability to control the entirety of the rendering process.

Development notes have been updated to reflect current plans. If you wish to see what’s going on look at the pre0.2-shader branch in CVS (it’ll be merged to HEAD in near future.)

Bad things, Good peole (2003-04-24)

Some nasty accuracy problems have cropped up (see grt-talk archives fro details), but on the upside we have multiplied: Simon Adameit is working on new primitives, and Kevin Rosenberg came aboard to work on a Debian package and ensure SBCL compatibility.

Road to 0.2 (2003-04-16)

The progress toward 0.2 is going nicely: CSG is pretty much in place, and work on bounding has begun.

GRT 0.1 is out! (2003-04-11)

What else is there to say? Have a look at features, and get yours from: here.

More Noise (2003-04-02)

Perlin noise has been implemented, so we are feature complete for 0.1!

Next: API cleanup.

Getting There (2003-04-01)

Unfortunate real-life conserns halted work for a while, but things are looking up:

  • Jason Dagit has joined the project, so this is no longer a one-man-show.
  • Affine transformations have been implemented, so only Perlin-noise is missing from the 0.1 feature list.

Once the feature list is complete there will still be some wait before 0.1: the API has to be cleaned up a bit, some optimizations might be in order, and an install & build script has to be written.

A Change of Plans (2002-12-28)

A major change of plans: libgrtlite is no longer developed, and work has started on Common Lisp implementation of GRT.

To make a long story short:

  • Lisp allows with grace a flexible system that the user can adap to his or her own needs: just what GRT is supposed to be.
  • The productivity boost of using Lisp over C is amazing! This way GRT will proceed much faster — no more core dumps.

Expect GRT 0.1 to be out in a month or so!

Old News

 

Links


Samples


Last updated: Wed Jul 16 04:42:22 EEST 2003

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