Free spheres software for linux

Spice Trade project is an RPG/strategy/adventure game.

Spice Trade is an RPG/adventure/strategy game in which the main character is a poor man who has lost his parents, inherited some land and a house.

He becomes a trader of spices and herbs in Baghdad at a time when Europeans are starting their "great voyages of exploration".

The game character has to ensure that the Europeans do not take over his country and his culture, while he has to expand the sphere of influence of his own culture.

Raster3D is a powerful set of tools for generating high quality raster images of proteins or other molecules.
The core program renders spheres, triangles, cylinders, and quadric surfaces with specular highlighting, Phong shading, and shadowing.
It uses an efficient software Z-buffer algorithm that is independent of any graphics hardware.
Main features:
- Raster3D uses a fast Z-buffer algorithm to produce high quality pixel images featuring one shadowing light source, additional non-shadowing light sources, specular highlighting, transparency, and Phong shaded surfaces. Output is in the form of a pixel image with 24 bits of color information per pixel plus one matte channel.
- Raster3D does not depend on graphics hardware. The rendering program currently supports output to files in AVS, JPEG, TIFF, PNG and SGI libimage format. To actually view or manipulate the images produced, you must also have installed an image viewing package (e.g. John Cristys ImageMagick or the SGI libimage utilities). The Raster3D rendering program can be integrated with ImageMagick to expand the flexibility of output formats and interactive use.
- Ancillary programs are provided for the generation of object descriptions based on atomic coordinates stored in PDB format. Although Raster3D is not intended as a general purpose ray-tracing package, nothing in the rendering process is specific to molecular graphics. Some of the algorithms used have been chosen for speed rather than generality, however. They work well for molecular graphics images, but possibly would produce odd results if used for very different types of image.
- Raster3D currently supports rendering six object types: spheres, triangles, planes, smooth-ended cylinders, round-ended cylinders, and quadric surfaces. It also supports the definition of material properties (transparency, bounding planes, color, reflectivity) that apply to groups of objects within the rendered scene.
Enhancements:
- changed the default output format to PNG for all programs

Pixie is a RenderMan like photorealistic renderer. It is being developed in the hope that it will be useful for graphics research and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer.
Pixie Renderer project is an open source project licensed under Gnu Public License (GPL).
Pixie is an open source project. None of the people contributing to Pixie is making any money out of it and were not asking for money. We need your feedback to keep this project alive. Use Pixie, submit bug reports, pictures you rendered with Pixie or just your good wishes.
One of the biggest considerations in Pixies development is the modularity. If youre interested in developing additional features / improving current features, improving the web site, optimizing Pixie, please let us know.
Main features:
- All RenderMan 3.2 primitives
- Quadrics: Sphere, Disk, Cone, Paraboloid, Hyperboloid, Cylinder, Toroid
- Parametrics: Bilinear/Bicubic patches, NURBS
- Subdivision Surfaces including crease/hole/interpolateboundary tags
- Points
- Curves
- Convex / Concave polygons with or without holes and their meshes
- Object instancing / delayed primitives
- Displacements
- Programmable shading (RenderMan Shading Language)
- High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
- High dynamic range input/output
- Raytracing
- Motion blur
- Depth of field
- Reyes style rendering (very fast)
- Occlusion culling
- Network parallel rendering
- DSO shaders
- Global illumination
- Photon mapping
- Irradiance caching
- Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
Enhancements:
- 64Bit clean codebase. The Pixie source should compile cleanly on 64Bit platforms. Please let us know if you have any issues with this. Note: youll need libtiff (and X11 on linux / OSX) to be compiled in 64Bit mode too.
- Fixed issues with dissapearing subdiv geometry when raytracing
- Fixed issues with speckled irradiance / occlusion data when using the "R" mode
- Reduced raytrace memory overhead
- Support for vector/color/point/normal subscripting shorthand in SL v[n] = x => setcomp(v,n,x) x = v[n] => x = comp(v,n)

Antiprism project is a suite of programs for the generation, manipulation, and visualisation of polyhedra.
Make a cube
This can be done with unipoly, which can be used to make all the uniform polyhedra.
unipoly cube > cube.off
Display with
off2pov -o cube.pov cube.off
povray +a +p cube.pov
Make the dual octahedron
pol_recip is used for making duals by polar reciprocation.
To make a nice compound the radius of the sphere used for reciprocation needs to be the distance from the cube centre to the mid-point of an edge, and the sphere centre must be the centre of the cube.
unipoly has centred the cube on (0, 0, 0), which is the default centre for pol_recip. The radius can be specified using the -R option and passing two adjacent vertex index numbers of the cube. Use off2pov with the -n option to display the cube with its vertex numbers.
off2pov -x vf -n -o cube.pov cube.off
povray +a +p cube.pov
Vertices 3 and 5 are adjacent, so make the dual octahedron like this, and display it.
pol_recip -R 3,5 cube.off > oct.off
off2pov -o oct.pov oct.off
povray +a +p oct.pov
Merge the polyhedra
OFF files are merged with off_merge
off_util cube.off oct.off > cub_oct.off
Display the result.
off2pov -o cub_oct.pov cub_oct.off
povray +a +p cub_oct.pov
Use colours
To make it clearer that this is a compound of a cube and octahedron the two polyhedra could be given different colours using off_color.
Colour the cube faces red, and the octahedron faces green.
off_color -f 1,0,0 cube.off > red_cube.off
off_color -f 0,1,0 oct.off > green_oct.off
Now merge and display as before, this time making the edge and vertex elements smaller than the defaults
off_util red_cube.off green_oct.off > color_cub_oct.off
off2pov -v 0.02 -e 0.016 -o color_cub_oct.pov color_cub_oct.off
povray +a +p color_cub_oct.pov
Enhancements:
- Edge handling has been improved.
- The GLU tesselator is used for all polygon tesselation, making polygon display more consistent in export formats.
- The minimum enclosing ball is used for camera positioning, allowing better use of screen space.
- Special duals can be calculated automatically.
- There is a new program which spirals points on a sphere, and another which arranges points in rings on a sphere.

Truevision is a 3D modeler for Gnome and Povray.
Truevision is a 3D modeler for Gnome. It is still in developpement, so be carefull and save often.
Main features:
- create some objects :
- finite solid primitives : blob, box, sphere, cone, cylinder, torus, heightfield, superellipsoid, lathe, sphere
- finite patch primitive : disc
- infinite solid primitive : plane
- lights : point, cylindrical, spot, area, light groups
- csg operators : union, merge, intersection, difference
- athmospherics : background, skysphere, media, fog
- manipulate them ( rotate, scale, translate ... )
- manipulate and edit the camera.
- render the scene with the multithreaded povray frontend.
- create and edit materials , with preview in editor.
- output the scene to povray .
- save and load scenes, objects, and materials.
- save materials with preview in material library.

Marble is an early beta preview of the Marble Widget application which is targeted for KDE 4.
You need to install both packages: "marble" and "marble-data" to run Marble.
Marble is a generic geographical map widget that is meant to be used by KDE4 applications. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesnt make use of any hardware acceleration (No OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind its rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget. To improve speed I decided to compile the Kubuntu packages with SSE support (-msse).
Main features:
- Marble uses a minimal free dataset that can be used offline. Currently the total amount of data that is meant to be shipped is about 5 MB.
- Marble doesnt use OpenGL or 3D hardware acceleration. It just uses Arthur as a painting backend. Extending it later on to support OpenGL as well shouldnt be hard however I dont consider that the primary focus. Depending on your hardware and the maps being displayed framerate is approximately 5-20 fps.
- Marble uses vector as well as bitmap data: Currently it uses the very old MWDB II data combined with ETOPO 2, which I will update to current SRTM soon.
- Marble displays the world map as a 3D sphere, because its more fun to use and less subject to distortion (So with regard to that its just like NASA WorldWind, Earth3D and Google Earth)
- Marble should start up almost instantly. Currently it "cold" starts fully within 2-5 seconds. On each subsequent start it takes about one second.
- Uses KML-Import to display places (Google Earths open format to store placemarks)
- Cities Down to 12000 inhabitants that you can click on using the mouse. Highest Mountains of each continent. Automatic Placemark label placement.
- Different Map Themes, Layers
- Dynamic Coordinate Grid
- Measure Tool
- Basic Wikipedia integration

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file.
The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer(tm) was developed from DKBTrace 2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people (called the POV-Team?) in their spare time. The headquarters of the POV-Team is on the internet (see "Where to Find POV-Ray Files" for more details).
The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions on using the ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to start from scratch.
In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the shape or material name in your scene.
Ray-tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.
Ray-tracing is a rendering technique that calculates an image of a scene by simulating the way rays of light travel in the real world. However it does its job backwards. In the real world, rays of light are emitted from a light source and illuminate objects. The light reflects off of the objects or passes through transparent objects. This reflected light hits our eyes or perhaps a camera lens. Because the vast majority of rays never hit an observer, it would take forever to trace a scene.
Ray-tracing programs like POV-Ray start with their simulated camera and trace rays backwards out into the scene. The user specifies the location of the camera, light sources, and objects as well as the surface texture properties of objects, their interiors (if transparent) and any atmospheric media such as fog, haze, or fire.
For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera, into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These "viewing rays" originate from the viewer, represented by the camera, and pass through the viewing window (representing the final image).
Every time an object is hit, the color of the surface at that point is calculated. For this purpose rays are sent backwards to each light source to determine the amount of light coming from the source. These "shadow rays" are tested to tell whether the surface point lies in shadow or not. If the surface is reflective or transparent new rays are set up and traced in order to determine the contribution of the reflected and refracted light to the final surface color.
Special features like inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity), atmospheric effects and area lights make it necessary to shoot a lot of additional rays into the scene for every pixel.
Main features:
- Easy to use scene description language.
- Large library of stunning example scene files.
- Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures.
- Very high quality output image files (up to 48-bit color).
- 16 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms using appropriate hardware.
- Create landscapes using smoothed height fields.
- Many camera types, including perspective, orthographic, fisheye, etc.
- Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for sophisticated lighting.
- Photons for realistic, reflected and refracted, caustics. Photons also interact with media.
- Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking surfaces.
- Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity) for more realistic lighting.
- Atmospheric effects like atmosphere, ground-fog and rainbow.
- Particle media to model effects like clouds, dust, fire and steam.
- Several image file output formats including Targa, BMP (Windows only), PNG and PPM.
- Basic shape primitives such as ... spheres, boxes, quadrics, cylinders, cones, triangle and planes.
- Advanced shape primitives such as ... Tori (donuts), bezier patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth triangles, text, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes, fractals, isosurfaces and the parametric object.
- Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions, merges, intersections and differences.
- Objects are assigned materials called textures (a texture describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape) and interior properties such as index of refraction and particle media (formerly known as "halos").
- Built-in color and normal patterns: Agate, Bozo, Bumps, Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard, Mandel, Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood, Wrinkles and image file mapping. Or build your own pattern using functions.
- Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver, Stone, Wood.
- Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent textures or tiles of textures or material map files.
- Display preview of image while rendering (not available on all platforms).
- Halt and save a render part way through, and continue rendering the halted partial render later.