Stephan Reiter

Realtime Ray Tracing

Stephan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:38:44 +0000

Within the context of my Diploma thesis I developed an open source ray tracing library named rapido. It provides ray tracing support for static and dynamic geometry and aims to deliver real–time frame rates for scenes with up to 1 million triangles on then current hardware (2008).

rapido has been used in a number of applications, such as an implementation of the BART benchmark for animated scenes and a viewer for maps from Raven Software’s game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Furthermore it powers a ray tracing based rendering backend for the ioquake3 engine, which enables ray traced graphics in games like id Software’s Quake 3 Arena and Raven Software’s Elite Force. This rendering backend relies on the LLVM for dynamic generation of shading code, which I presented at the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Raytracing with my contribution Run-Time Code Generation for Materials.

rapido is written in C/C++ and is available for download at SourceForge.net. The library was released as free software under the terms of the BSD License. The design choices, the implementation, and benchmark data are discussed in detail in my Diploma thesis.

Videos

Software Rasterization

Stephan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:37:17 +0000

Muli3D is a cross-plattform software rasterization library that I developed in 2004–2005. It has support for DirectX 9-level features including vertex- and pixel shaders, floating point textures, cubemaps, mipmapping and render–to–texture operations. Muli3D mirrors the public interface of the DirectX 9 API to facilitate switching of the rendering backend in DX9–based applications.

Muli3D is written in C/C++. The SDK, which is available for download at SourceForge.net, comes with documented source code, an application framework, and several samples that present different aspects of Muli3D. This library was released as free software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Muli3D was featured in an article published in GameDev.net’s Hardcore Game Programming column.

Videos

Wordpress Plugin: Scissors

Stephan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:39:29 +0000

Scissors is a plugin for the WordPress blogging system that adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved, which improves the perceived image quality while reducing the amount of data transferred at the same time.

Scissors was translated into a total of 20 languages by WordPress users and remains popular among users of WordPress versions 2.8 and prior with a download count of more than 80,000 on Jan 1st, 2010. As of version 2.9 of WordPress, image editing functionality based on the Scissors code comes out of the box. I therefore decided to stop maintenance of the plugin, but others picked up where I left off: Anton Huizinga created a version of Scissors that is compatible with WordPress 2.9, which I would like to explicitly recommend to people who enjoy using Scissors’ features that have not yet been integrated into the WP core.

Screencast

Click here to view the embedded video.