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5. Starting and Using the Program

Command Line Tool

The commandline tool is invoked with to parameters. The first Parameter is the source scene file, the second parameter is the output file.

Example:

coolray example1.ray example1.ppm

CoolRay detects the ending of the output file and selects the correct output methods. If there is no imagelib support compiled into the image, only ppm is supported.

If the imagelib support was compiled into the image the following endings are supported:

.bmp: Windows Bitmap
.jpg: JPeg
.gif: Graphics Interchage Format
.png: Portable Network Graphics
.tga: Targa format (not RLE encoded)
.tif: 

Additional to the input and output file, some options can be given to CoolRay. To override the default image size, you can use the -w and -h option.

Example:

coolray -w 640 -h 480 example1.ray example1.ppm

There are two more options that switches CoolRay in a different mode. Instead of raytracing, it uses the objects for dumping information about their attributes. -o generates in the current directory a plain text file, -x generates xml output. No input or output files are needed with these options.

usage: coolray [options] inputfile [outputfile]
options:
  -w<width>   width of image
  -h<height>  height of image
  -o          output objects (no input/outputfile needed)
  -x          output objects as XML data (no input/outputfile needed)           

GUI Tool