Tachyon: 1111111111

# Tachyon

Tachyon is an efficient, parallelised raytracer, written by John Stone (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/) for use in scientific visualisation applications. The current version is 0.99b6, released in 2013.

This was uploaded to GitHub as the download link has been broken recently. The original package README is given below.

```$Id: README,v 1.28 2013/04/21 19:32:42 johns Exp $```

## README for Tachyon(tm) Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracing Software
Tachyon - 1967, from Greek "tachys", meaning "swift" or "speedy",
          A hypothetical particle held to travel only faster than light.

Author: John E. Stone - john.stone@gmail.com (preferred email address) 
                        johns@ks.uiuc.edu    (work email address)

## What is Tachyon?
Tachyon was originally written as part of my M.S. degree in Computer Science, 
but I have made an ongoing effort to maintain and improve at as a
hobby, and for the benefit of the molecular visualization community where
Tachyon gets significant use as the built-in photorealistic renderer in 
the molecular visualization program VMD.

In the Tachyon distribution you will find:

- Tachyon ray tracing library:
  A portable, high performance parallel ray tracing system supporting 
  MPI and multithreaded implementations.  Tachyon is built as a 
  C/C++ callable library, which can be used with the included demo 
  programs or within your own application.  The distribution 
  also includes a simple scene file parser front-end which reads 
  a few other input file formats such as MGF, NFF, and an old
  version of AC3D.

- Tachyon standalone ray tracer:
  Tachyon implements all of the basic geometric primitives such as
  triangles, planes, spheres, cylinders, etc.  Recent versions of
  Tachyon support ambient occlusion lighting, material properties
  for shading with angle-modulated transparency, and many other
  features of particular use in molecular visualization. 
  The original goal in developing Tachyon was to make it fast 
  and to parallelize well both for shared memory, distributed
  memory parallel, and hybrid shared/distributed memory parallel
  computers.  These areas of emphasis are what set Tachyon apart 
  from more full-featured programs like POV-Ray, Rayshade, and 
  many others.  Tachyon is an excellent alternative to slower 
  programs for computationally demanding animation and 
  scientific visualization tasks.  As time goes on, Tachyon will 
  incorporate more features, but will continue its emphasis on 
  minimalism, rendering performance, and simplicity.

- Example scenese:
  Tachyon comes with example scenes for use with the 
  standalone ray tracer executable.  Note that some of
  the example scenes require texture maps and/or volume data sets
  which are distributed seperately due to their large size.

## How do I compile and run Tachyon?
The build process is quite simple.  On Unix, just "cd" into the 
unix directory and type "make".  You wil see a list of common
configurations that can be built.  This will work fine for almost 
all common Unix systems.  The Make-arch file contains a large
number of other build configurations that are not listed 
in the main list, if you don't see what you're looking for.
To customize the Tachyon build to enable optional features,
to force the use of single-precision arithmetic, or other 
site-specific customizations, the Make-config file should be
edited as-needed.
To compile Tachyon for unusual hardware or software environments,
the Make-arch file may also need to be edited to add a new
set of make rules for the new target platform.
These steps are discussed in more detail in the README file 
included in the unix directory.

On Windows, the process is as simple as loading up the project files
in the msvc subdirectory and building them.

All of the documentation, research papers, and seperately distributed
components related to this project can be retrieved from:
  http://www.photonlimited.com/~johns/tachyon/
  http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/tachyon/

In addition to the existing documentation, feel free to send me email
with questions on how things work, or for help getting things compiled
on platforms that aren't built into the makefiles that come with the
distribution.

## How can I contribute to further development?
I continue to work on this software in my free time.  I depend
on other individuals or institutions to provide me access to 
the various parallel computers and compilers that Tachyon supports 
in order to continue maintaining it on those platforms.  If you
would like to see Tachyon ported to a new parallel platform,
send me a note and I'll be happy to take a look at it.
I would be happy to collaborate with others on extending 
Tachyon for a wider variety of uses.

## Copyrights etc.
All work included in this distribution is copyrighted by John E. Stone,
except where noted within specific source files.  You may use this code
for any purpose you wish, as long as credit is given to its source(s).

Last updated April 21, 2013
 John E. Stone
 john.stone@gmail.com
 johns@ks.uiuc.edu

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