Welcome to the Dawn home page
I have just made this basic design for the dawn home page. The page is currently under construction.
What is Dawn?
Dawn is a free Global Illumination renderer. Global Illumination renderers are ray tracers, but with the extension of being capable of rendering realistic indirect illumination.
If you do not know what a ray tracer is, we suggest you become acquainted with POV-Ray. POV-Ray is a very comprehensible ray tracer containing very many features. However, POV-Ray is not capable of rendering images that show complex real-world phenomena, such as sub-surface scattering. It is capable of rendering indirect illumination, but the approach used in POV-Ray is rather slow and inefficient. Dawn is an attempt to create a very fast indirect illumination model.
Also, if you are interested in lighting and rendering algorithms, Dawn's source code can learn you a lot. Dawn's code was written to be quite understandable. Also, we seek to add documentation about the algorithms that Dawn uses, in the future.
Latest developments
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005:
The framework for the script parser has been completed and the parser can handle
several kinds of objects now. Currently, more objects are being added to the parser.
We have made a Cornell Box test scene, to test future global illumination capabilities.
The global illumination methods are currently being thought about. This planning process
may take quite a deal of time, because we desire to find the most efficient approach and
directly implement that.
Friday, June 2nd, 2005:
We have just finished the implementation of the plane object. Also, we have made
object and light source creation easier (light sources are now stored in an STL vector).
We will now start developing pieces of the scene script parser and more object
implementations.