Apparent inconsistency in rad when using the -N option

Hi Terrance,

The trouble is that you are using the -i rendering option as if it were part of a view. Very clever, and it works if you don't use the -N option of rad, but the mechanism behind the -N option with multiple views is that the view= variable is written to the stdin of an rpict running with the -S and -PP options, which shares memory on a multiprocessing platform. In this mode, rpict just ignores any non-view options on stdin, which is why it isn't working as expected.

The latest HEAD allows you to run rad with -N on a single view (i.e., "-v Plan" or "-v Plan-i" in your case), and it runs rpiece to split the work. With your rad input file, you could run two rad processes, each with -N 4, one for each type of image, and get your job done in parallel that way.

I usually have a separate rad input file if I'm using the -i option, which I attach to the render= variable. I had never thought of doing it your way. Reprogramming rad to properly handle non-view options in view= settings would be a bit of work....

-Greg

ยทยทยท

From: Terrance Mc Minn <[email protected]>
Date: June 1, 2010 7:46:09 PM PDT

Typically when creating irradiance images for falsecolor plots I set up two views in the rif file:
view= Plan -vf views/Plan.vf
view= Plan-i -vf views/Plan.vf -i

When rendering in rad via rad -N 8 studio1.rif the two images render as radiance. The output from the rad command:
rad -N 8 studio1.rif
...

When rendering without the -N option in rad or (TRAD default behaviour - yet to figured out how to specify the -N option for trad) the output is the expected radiance and irradiance images. The output from the rad command:
rad studio1.rif
...
Version Head 2010-05-24
on Mac OSX 10.6.3

Notes:
1) For the compile the head didn't include the tiff source yet the makeall still required it (copied the src/px/tiff folder from an earlier download and recompiled).
2) To make trad run under OSX:
mv ray/bin/trad ray/bin/trad-original
new file ray/bin/trad
#!/bin/bash
exec wish /path_to_ray_folder/bin/trad-original "$@"

Any ideas or have I misunderstood the usage of the -N option in rad.

--
Terrance Mc Minn
Lecturer
School of Built Environment
Curtin University of Technology