Rendering Tools

There are three different ways to render a geometry: you can explicitly create a Camera instance, call the function view(), or use the script chroma-cam.

Example:

>>> chroma.view(chroma.make.cube())

To control the camera refer to the following table and Camera Hotkeys.

Thing You Do	Modifier	Thing That Happens
click and drag		rotate camera around object
click and drag	shift	translate camera
click and drag	control	rotate camera
mouse wheel		zoom

Camera Hotkeys

Command	Thing That Happens
alt	toggle fine motion
F11	toggle fullscreen
escape	quit
=	increase the alpha depth by one
-	decrease the alpha depth by one
pagedown	move down through the bounding volume hierarchy tree
pageup	move up through the bounding volume hierarchy tree
3	toggle 3d mode
g	toggle 3d colors between red/cyan and green/magenta
F12	take a screenshot
m	make a movie
F5 [1]	toggle hybrid monte carlo rendering mode
F6 [2]	place a light source at the camera’s current location
F7 [2]	add another light source at the camera’s current location

Footnotes

[1]	The hybrid monte carlo rendering mode requires the geometry have surfaces with a non-zero diffuse reflection probability.

[2]	(1, 2) Only available in hybrid monte carlo rendering mode.

The Camera Class

class chroma.Camera(geometry, size=(800, 600), device_id=None)

The Camera class uses pygame to render a geometry. Camera objects inherit from multiprocessing.Process so that you can render multiple geometries in separate windows at the same time.

start()

Create a pygame window, intialize CUDA, and start the camera.