[Savannah-register-public] [task #7904] Submission of snogray

[Miles Bader]

Follow-up Comment #3, task #7904 (project administration):

> 1. You have specified GNU GPLv2 or later in project details,
> but use GPLv3 in the project.  We can silently change project 
> details to reflect this upon approval.

Ok, please do that.  GPLv3 is the intended license.

> 2. It would be helpful for us to have a bit more detailed
> description of what your program does.

Hmmm, how about something like this:

A "physically-based" ray-tracing rendering system.

Snogray is a program for rendering 3d scenes, using monte-carlo ray-tracing. 
It is "physically based", meaning that it tries to calculate light transport
in a physically plausible way when that is practical (for instance, all
light-falloff is inherently 1/r^2, unlike some older ray-tracers, and
reflection/refraction are calculated using Fresnel's formulas).

Snogray's goals include:

(1) A "rich" scene description language which is easily and practical for
humans (and especially programmers) to write, in the style of POVray.  This is
in contrast to many other modern renderers that use human-unfriendly scene
description formats, and essentially require scenes to be created using a
separate GUI modelling program.  To do this, Snogray uses the Lua language as
its main scene description language.  Lua is elegant and very friendly (for
both beginners and experts).

(2) A wide variety of input and output formats, so the user can use input
files directly without converting them.  Lua, one may use 3DS and NFF scene
files, PLY and other mesh formats, many image input formats (including HDR
formats such as OpenEXR and RGBE/.hdr/.pic).

(3) Modern rendering features.  Currently snogray supports such features as
object instancing, area-lights, image-based lighting, depth-of-field, and both
image-based and procedural texturing (including bump-mapping).  It is planned
to add many other features, most importantly global illumination methods such
as photon-mapping and instance-radiosity (currently the only supported
mechanism for indirect illumination is fairly naive recursive tracing, which
is of course very slow, although usable).

Thanks,

-Miles


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