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KRay Help |
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This help documentation was last updated on Nov.16 1997 for KRay 0.01
KRay is a small Ray-Tracer for the KDE project. It creates pictures of a simple scene containing a sky, a ground, the hell, and two spheres, one being smaller then the other. For each object, a number of surfaces can be chosen from the startup dialog. Surfaces include textured surfaces like Marble, Sky and Hell as well as reflecting surfaces like Mirror, Brass, Glass and Water.
KRay is based on the program by Josef Pöpsel and Ute Clausen which was published in c't 1/93.Installation of KRay follows the same procedure as for most KDE and GNU packages. After unpacking the sources, change into the Kray main directory and type:
Usually you are required to have root priviliges to install the program. Therefore the su command. To compile kde you need the following libraries:
After starting KRay it will show the Main Dialog. Here you can chose the size of the picture you want to create as well as the surfaces for the different objects in the scene. Once you've done that, you can press the "Generate" Button or chose "Generate Picture" from the File-Menu and a new picture will be created.
The contents of the menubar are rather self explanatory, because it contains only a minimum set of options. Further options will be added in future versions.
For chosing the size of the picture I recomment retaining the 4:3 ratio, since it gives the best effects. You are however welcome to experiment ;-). Note that generating a bigger picture will take more time (you didn't expect that, did you ?) Generating a 400 by 300 pixel picture takes about 2 minutes on my Pentium 133 running Linux.
The program offers different surfaces for the objects, which differ in color, reflection, and transition. Since the sky and the hell cannot be reflecting or tranient, the selection of surfaces for these objects is more limited than for the other objects. Note that the surface of the "Hell" can only be seen, when a transient surface (i.e. water or glass) is chosen for the ground.
No Bugs known, but I haven't been testing too much ;-)
Please report bugs to the Authors
KRay is written by Torsten Reuß .
This help file is written by Torsten Reuß