Actinon - Raytracer

What it is

Actinon is a lightweight ray-tracing renderer and interpreter of a dedicated scripting language. It can render 3D scenes, employing techniques like distributed tracing, path tracing, anti-aliasing and others. It can handle transparency, reflection, refraction, media-transition, diffuse-light, indirect-light and more.

Various realistic surfaces are achieved by mixing fresnel-reflection, chromatic-reflection, (Oren-Nayar) diffuse-reflection and by simulating surface roughness. The rendering-engine is multi-threaded.

For scene-design I developed a special language. It supports the composition of complex objects from simpler objects. Geometric operations on objects like translation, scaling and rotations can be applied easily and intuitively. Vectors and matrices have dedicated types with associated operators supporting arithmetic in a 3D vector space. The language also allows computing image sequences (e.g. for videos).

How it works

Actinon is a console-application. It takes a text-source file as argument and executes its content, which normally comprises of the scene design, virtual camera specifications, render specifications and instructions how to render one or more images.

Impressum