TACHYON(1)

✨ TACHYON(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to Tachyon, the Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracer 💖 no cap, this thing is iconic.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tachyon modelfile [options]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So. Tachyon is built to be a very fast renderer — it's all ray tracing, and it uses parallel processing to hit that high performance 💅. Literally the whole point.

NOTE: the ** marks in this page = default behaviour. iykyk 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

💜 Model file formats supported:

• filename.dat — the model files that originated with this package ✨
• filaname.ac — AC3D model files 🦋
• filename.nff — the NFF scene format used by Eric Haines' SPD 🌈

💬 Message Options:

• +V — verbose messages on ✨
• -V — verbose messages off ** 👑

🏎️ Speed Tuning Options:

• -raydepth xxx — maximum ray recursion depth
• -numthreads xxx — (** default is auto-determined, she picks for you bestie 💅)
• -nobounding — turns bounding off
• -boundthresh xxx — (** default threshold is 16)

🎨 Shading Options:

• -fullshade — best quality rendering (and slowest) ** 👑
• -mediumshade — good quality rendering, but no shadows 😭
• -lowshade — low quality rendering, preview (and fast)
• -lowestshade — worst quality rendering, preview (and fastest) 💀

💡 Lighting Options:

• -rescale_lights xxx — rescale light intensity values by the specified factor (this happens before the other lighting overrides take effect, so keep that in mind)
• -auto_skylight xxx — force use of ambient occlusion lighting, auto-rescaling direct light sources to compensate for the ambient occlusion factor. (use value 0.7 as a good starting point ✨)
• -add_skylight xxx — force use of ambient occlusion lighting, manually-rescaling direct light sources to compensate for the ambient occlusion factor
• -skylight_maxdist xxx — AO maximum occlusion distance cutoff
• -skylight_samples xxx — number of sample rays to shoot

✨ Specular Highlight Shading Options:

• -shade_phong — Phong specular highlights
• -shade_blinn — Blinn's specular highlights ** 💅
• -shade_blinn_fast — fast approximation to Blinn's highlights
• -shade_nullphong — disable specular highlights 🙈

🫧 Transparency Shading Options:

• -trans_max_surfaces xxx — limit the number of transparent surfaces shown to the number specified
• -trans_orig — Original implementation **
• -trans_raster3d — Raster3D angle-based opacity modulation
• -trans_vmd — Opacity post-multiply used by VMD

🌚 Transparent Surface Shadowing Options:

• -shadow_filter_on — Transparent objects cast shadows **
• -shadow_filter_off — Transparent objects do not cast shadows

🌫️ Fog Shading Options:

• -fog_radial — Radial fog implementation **
• -fog_vmd — Planar OpenGL-like fog used by VMD

🔄 Surface Normal/Winding Order Fixup Mode:

• -normalfixup [off | flip | guess] — (**off is default)

🌈 Antialiasing Options:

• -aasamples xxx — (maximum supersamples taken per pixel) (** default is 0, or scene file determined)

🖼️ Output Options:

• -res Xres Yres — override scene-defined output image size
• -o outfile.tga — set output file name
• -clamp — clamp pixel values to [0 to 1) (** default)
• -normalize — normalize pixel values to [0 to 1)
• -gamma val — normalize + apply gamma correction
• -format BMP — 24-bit Windows BMP (uncompressed)
• -format JPEG — 24-bit JPEG (compressed, but lossy 😭)
• -format PNG — 24-bit PNG (compressed, lossless) 🎀
• -format PPM — 24-bit PPM (uncompressed)
• -format PPM48 — 48-bit PPM (uncompressed)
• -format PSD48 — 48-bit PSD (uncompressed)
• -format RGB — 24-bit SGI RGB (uncompressed)
• -format TARGA — 24-bit Targa (uncompressed) ** 👑

🎬 Animation Related Options:

• -camfile filename.cam — Animate using file of camera positions
• -nosave — Disable writing of output frames to disk (only used for doing real-time rendering) 🏎️

🛸 Interactive Spaceball/SpaceNavigator Control:

• -spaceball — Enable Spaceball/SpaceNavigator camera flight ✈️
• -spaceballport serialportdevicename — (only for serial devices)

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright 1994-2022, John E. Stone <john.stone@gmail.com> 💖

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k that's the whole page bestie, go render something iconic 🌟

this was Tachyon version 0.99.5, from April 2022 — mwah, periodt 💅✨