Tutorials

AC3D tutorial movies
AC3D and Second Life (includes movies)
AC3D and Google Earth

Renderers

  • AC3D is easily configured to render images with external ray tracers. Inivis recommends PovRay from www.povray.org.

For developers

  • Description of the AC3D file format
  • AC3D file loader/viewer source code - C source code for an AC3D file loader/viewer. Requires Opengl and Glut. Windows exe, VC++ project files and unix makefile included.
  • If you have a simple file format that you want to visualize in AC3D, it's relatively easy to turn it into an AC3D file with a script. Scott Nelson wrote this unix shell-script to convert a file of 3D points (X, Y, Z) into an AC3D line/polyline
  • Andreas Paul wrote a small program that displays a triangle file (.tri) in OpenGL (or Mesa). You need to have glut installed to compile this - tri_view.tgz
  • Steve Baker wrote a program that parses an AC3D file and generates C++/OpenGL code that displays the file - see ac2gl.

Looking for more resources? Want to announce a new one? - see the tutorials and resources sections on

the AC3D forum.