1. Introduction

The SCN (SCeNe format) was invented to replace a very simple format called SFF for the RTrace ray-tracer. It is used to describe environments (geometry, topology, attributes, etc.) that are processed by programs called ray-tracers, although it can be used by other programs.

2. Overview

The RTrace ray-tracer uses a very simplistic format (its only advantage is the simplicity!). It only reads numbers (and strings for file names), but its syntax is very rigid. To avoid this, I decided to create a much more elaborated, easy to write and flexible scene description format, which I called SCN.
To avoid modifying the RTrace input code, a translator from SCN to SFF was implemented as a separate program (Scn2Sff), meant to be used as a preprocessor for RTrace (in UNIX and DOS, these two programs can be used in a pipe like scn2sff | rtrace).