IL
more examples and latest extensions
Introduction
IL is the second language of this type. The first one was Intercol. The products of gig3d (Electrogig) were based on it. The lessons learned when integrating a shading and texturing language in Intercol were fully exploited as a new paradigm in language design. Now I make IL available as a free, stand alone, language. Currently it is only available for 64 bit Windows.
Please read the (very outdated) manual and the IL paper for further introduction.
Installation
Just make a directory (C:\il for instance) and unzip the downloaded file in it. The html manual is included. The program files il.il and rtest.il are also included.
Execute start.bat to start the interpreter. Type read("rtest") to render your first image. You can find the result in the img directory. If your computer supports OpenGL, you can try read("rtestgl") to get the result in a window. (Esc gets you back to the interpreter)
Try read("testray") to get this:
Type types() to get an impression what's implemented. In the coming days I will try to update the documentation. In the meantime take a look here for some examples.
Image format and utilities
IL uses tiled tiff image files, both to render to, and as texture maps. To help with conversions there are a couple of command line utilities in imgutils.zip. The executables are self explanatory when executed without parameters. The simple batch files untile and tile can be used to convert to and from ordinary tiff image files when you have problems reading the rendered images with your imaging tools. Unzip this file in a directory that's in your execution path.
The renderer
The 3D renderer used in IL is a derivative of the raytracer in the old gig3d products. The procedural texturing possibilities are much more extended.