
   I am happy to announce the availability of the Blue Moon Rendering
Tools (BMRT), a collection of rendering programs which adhere to the
RenderMan(R) interface standard.  RenderMan is a registered trademark
of Pixar.

   The toolkit consists of a full implementation of the RenderMan
standard which supports ray tracing, radiosity, area light sources,
texture and environment mapping, displacements, programmable shading
in the RenderMan Shading Language, motion blur, automatic ray cast
shadows, CSG, depth of field, support of imager and volume shaders,
and other advanced features.  The toolkit also contains quick RIB
previewers (using GL or X11) to allow "pencil tests" of scenes and
animations.

   The BMRT is being distributed as shareware.  Feel free to grab a
copy for evaluation.  If you like it and continue to use it, a
"donation" is requested.  In exchange, this makes you a registered
user, which means that you will be informed of bugs and updates, get
some support, etc.  It's all outlined in the License file that comes
with the distribution.

   The toolkit is distributed as binaries for the following platforms:

	o  SGI running IRIX 5.x/6.x (mips2, mips3, and mips4 available)
	o  NEXTSTEP ("fat" binaries for HP, Motorola, Intel, and SPARC)
	o  Linux and FreeBSD (i386/486/Pentium)
	o  Sun SPARC running SunOS or Solaris
	o  Windows 95 and Windows NT

    Source code is not distributed, so please don't even bother asking
for it.  The toolkit comes with full documentation, several example
scenes which illustrate the various nonstandard features, and several
example shaders.

   The BMRT is available via anonymous FTP:

	FTP to ftp.seas.gwu.edu
	login as "anonymous", use your email address as the password
	cd /pub/graphics/BMRT
	get the appropriate file for your architecture.

   For more details, feel free to contact me by email:

	Larry Gritz:  gritzl@acm.org

   Also there is a WWW page for BMRT at:

	http://www.seas.gwu.edu/student/gritz/bmrt.html


