# Tachyon User's Guide
Under Development

John E. Stone
E-Mail john.stone@gmail.com

### Abstract:

This document contains information on using Tachyon to create ray traced images, and animations. Information on the parallel raytracing engine and its use as an external rendering library is contained in other documents. Corrections and suggestions should be mailed to the author at john.stone@gmail.com

- Contents
- Introduction
  - Tachyon Feature List
- Compiling Tachyon From Source Code
- Running Tachyon
  - General command line options
  - Command line shading controls
  - Command line image format options
  - Interactive ray tracing
  - Performance tuning options
  - Tips for running MPI versions
- Scene Description Files
  - Basic Scene Requirements
  - Camera and viewing parameters
    - Camera projection modes
    - Common camera parameters
    - Viewing frustum
  - Including Files
  - Scene File Comments
  - Lights
  - Atmospheric effects
    - Fog
  - Objects
    - Spheres
    - Triangles
    - Smoothed Triangles
    - Infinite Planes
    - Rings
    - Infinite Cylinders
    - Finite Cylinders
    - Axis Aligned Boxes
    - Fractal Landscapes
    - Arbitrary Quadric Surfaces
    - Volume Rendered Scalar Voxels
  - Texture and Color
    - Simple Texture Characteristics
    - Texture Declaration and Aliasing
    - Image Maps and Procedural Textures
- Index