Blender would be a worthwhile project to port to AROS in the future when there are
skilled developers willing to put out the huge effort to do the work. It's a little beyond
my abilities at the moment. The Rendering Engine in Blender is called "Cycles".
RayStorm, however, has some great possibilities. The rendering engine in RayStorm
is based on a small raytracer. I found a man's name in the sources for RayStorm so
I researched it. Many years ago, a programmer named Paul Heckbert wrote a small
raytracer program the he said "could fit on a business card". In the years since then
many raytracer programs such a RayStorm have been based on Heckbert's formulas.
I attached the screenshot of his name in the RayStorm Preview.cpp module.
I was also experimenting with a small raytracer based on Heckbert's raytracer. The
shell program is only about 200 lines long. It creates 3d objects, a light source, a
camera, surfaces, materials, textures, and reflection maps then it renders the scene.
At first it wasn't writing the output file, but I rewrote that part so that now it works.
Copy the Raytracer.cpp file somewhere on your Icaros drive. Then enter a shell and
type "g++ -o Raytracer Raytracer.cpp" so that it generates an AROS executable.
Copy the raytracer file to RamDisk: or somewhere else. Use the AROS shell to cd to
that location where the program is. Type "Raytracer" and wait a few seconds for the
cursor to return. Check in your folder for a file called "Untitled.ppm". That's the file.
If you have the PPM or PNM datatype installed you can type "Multiview Untitled.ppm".
In a future version I might add a callback function and a progressbar while rendering.