Tachyon (software)

Tachyon
Original author(s)John E. Stone
Written inC
TypeRay tracing/3D rendering software
LicenseBSD-3-Clause
Websitejedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/tachyon/
Satellite tobacco mosaic virus molecular graphics produced in VMD and rendered using Tachyon. The scene is shown with a combination of direct lighting and ambient occlusion lighting to improve the visibility of pockets and cavities. The VMD axes are shown as an example of rendering of non-molecular geometry.
Tachyon rendering of a 1-billion atom aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 virion (COVID-19).
Tachyon rendering of a 1-billion atom aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 virion (COVID-19).
Intel iPSC/860 32-node parallel computer running a Tachyon performance test. August 22, 1995.

Tachyon is a parallel/multiprocessor ray tracing software. It is a parallel ray tracing library for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon implements rendering features such as ambient occlusion lighting, depth-of-field focal blur, shadows, reflections, and others. It was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860 by John Stone for his M.S. thesis at University of Missouri-Rolla.[1] Tachyon subsequently became a more functional and complete ray tracing engine, and it is now incorporated into a number of other open source software packages such as VMD, and SageMath. Tachyon is released under a permissive license (included in the tarball).

  1. ^ Stone, John E. (January 1998). "An Efficient Library for Parallel Ray Tracing and Animation". Masters Theses.