RAYGL: An OpenGL to POVRAY API

The OpenGL raster graphics API is well known amongst computer graphics programmers. However, while raster graphics dominates the interactive computer graphics industry, these systems are not able to produce scenes with the realism required by ventures such as the movie industry. For markets that require high levels of realism but not online generation of the scene, raytracing has become popular. Raytracing applications use application specific scene description languages (SDL) to describe the objects in a scene. However, there is no accepted standard SDL and an open source library to convert OpenGL code to SDL code would allow programmers who are already familiar with OpenGL to smoothly transition between raster graphics and raytracing without the need to learn an application specific SDL. We present an OpenGL like API that will interface with OpenGL (and the OpenGL Utility Toolkit GLUT) and that will write Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POVRay) scene files.