Snogray renderer

   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 / r2
   (unlike some older ray-tracers) and reflection/refraction are
   calculated using Fresnel's formulas).

   * For information on how to build snogray, see the file "README.building"

   * For information on how to run snogray, see the file "README.usage"


Snogray development goals:

   Snogray's goals include:

   1. A "rich" scene description language which is easy 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. In addition to Lua,
      one may use 3DS and NFF scene files, PLY and other mesh formats,
      and many image 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 instant-radiosity (currently the only supported
      mechanism for indirect illumination is fairly naïve recursive
      tracing, which is of course very slow, although usable for some
      scenes).


Current status

   Snogray currently works reasonably well, but is still very rough. In
   particular, it has no real notion of being "installed" — it expects
   to find any files it needs to load relative to the current directory.


Authors

   Most of snogray was written by Miles Bader.

   There are a few files written by other people included with the
   distribution (in general, these are not modified from their original
   source):

     * rply.c and rply.h:  Diego Nehab

     * lpeg.c and lpeg.html:  Roberto Ierusalimschy

     * Lua (if Lua is included in the distribution):  see http://www.lua.org


Licensing

   Most of source files in snogray are licensed under the GNU GPL
   license, version 3 or greater; see the COPYING file for details.

   Some files from external sources have different licenses:

    * rply.c and reply.h use the "MIT" license

    * lpeg.c uses a "BSD-like" license

    * If the Lua sources are included with this distribution, they use a
      "BSD-like" license

   All licenses are compatible with the GNU GPL v3 (and because most of
   the non-GPL licenses are more liberal than the GNU GPL, snogray as a
   whole may be considered to use the GNU GPL v3).


Download / Sources

   Homepage:		   http://snogray.nongnu.org

   Savannah project page:  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/snogray

   GIT source repository:  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/snogray.git
