This version of RATS is provided as is.
It should not crash your hard drive or burn your monitor,
but there's first time for anything, right?

RATS comes without any documentation. It has internal HELP
for all commands, MAN pages for difficult commands and TEST
suites for good-looking commands. Also, there are heaps of
datasets around that you may use as templates for your experiments.

SMOOTH is a utility that takes triangles and makes phong-smoothed
triangles out of them. Some datasets require SMOOTH to make things
look better. It is recommended to have SMOOTH handy in your PATH
somewhere. Based upon the great SMOOTH program by Andrew Glassner
in Graphics Gems.

                =====================================

A note about the datasets. RATS went thru a long evolution and
some commands used in some datasets became obsolete. Also, most
early datasets use "sample 16" which should be replaced by "sample 4"
to get the same quality. Otherwise, RATS will start shooting 16*16
rays per pixel, which might make you feel impatient.

All datasets are zipped. To unzip datasets, use "unzip" command under 
UNIX or PKUNZIP under DOS. Not sure about Windows. Those with the *.ice 
extension indicate that single floating point precision is enough. 
RATS is compiled with double float precision so it will handle all 
of them fine. Files with *.zip contain more than one file in the
archive.

Some datasets have copyright/special conditions. I have collected
them from public FTP sites, trying to preserve original messages
from the authors. Please, respect their rights and use the datasets
in good health.

It is important that you enjoy RATS. There are some bugs that
I was aware of, but forgot to fix them in time. I can't promise
to answer to all [un]satisfied users, but I am curious what
you think about it.


-Andrei Sherstyuk

ash@csse.monash.edu.au
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~ash

By the way, RATS is

1.  A popular exclamation
2.  A bunch of small rodents
3.  /Random/Access/Texture/S (people from Reyes Point think so)
5.  /Ray-tracing/Animation/Tools/Software
6.  /Ray-tracer/Animator/Testbed/System
7.  /Russian/Art/Turns/Stomachs
8.  /Rocket/Assisted/Takeoff/System

Send me your versions!