9fans archive / 2001 / 02 / 443 / prev next From: Andrey A Mirtchovski <aam396@mai...> Subject: [9fans] povray on p9 Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 01:31:02 -0600 (CST) disclaimer: for those of you not interested in povray or not knowing what it is, you can stop reading now, or first visit www.povray.org (this is not an add/spam) i did something very stupid yesterday -- i actually sat down and started playing with povray in order to see its capabilities and to learn something more about it... what a mistake! i spent the whole night sunday trying and testing different scenes, textures, this and that... not being an artist at all i quickly exhausted my imagination for new scenes and thought 'let's try and do an animation' -- simply enough, three one-liners later and some configuration magic and i was sitting there with 180 identical (almost) povray scripts for 180 frames of my first povray "animation"... wallclock execution timing showed that 180 frames were calculated for 196 minutes on my K6-2/500 running FreeBSD and i thought -- i have three cpu servers at school running plan9 and just waiting for somebody to send them some scenes to render. it could be done very easily (rc script), needs no excessive bandtwidth (i.e. all the information can reside on a single fileserver and needs not be local to the cpu doing the rendering, something that can't easily be done with bioinformatics and gigabyte-size databases) and will prove to be something very fun to play with! so, i downloaded the sources and amazingly 15 minutes later povray was operational -- the port proved very easy and probably everyone on this list will have no problems doing it. if anyone wants though i can provide additional information, or will gzip povray in modified state so that you just need to type 'make'... so far i do not experience any trouble running it on plan9 -- the speed is very good, but that can be due to the fact that i'm running on 450mhz PIII's instead of a 500 MhZ AMD.. 3-fold speed increase is what i observe. size of executable is: --rwxr-xr-x M 649 f2f sys 1904625 Feb 24 23:30 /386/bin/povray here is a link to one of the standard images that come with povray.. generated with the command (note, i have moved the povray library to $home/lib, will be fixed later): cpu% povray +Ichess2.pov +O$home/chess2.ppm +L$home/lib +W320 +H200 +FP Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.1g.Plan9.cc This is an unofficial version compiled by: FILL IN NAME HERE......................... The POV-Ray Team(tm) is not responsible for supporting this version. . . .(rendering sounds) . . Time For Trace: 0 hours 6 minutes 13.0 seconds (373 seconds) Total Time: 0 hours 6 minutes 13.0 seconds (373 seconds) the generated image is located here: http://homepage.usask.ca/~aam396/chess2.jpg So... i hope this isn't gone to waste -- didn't somebody say somewhere that p9 would make a great rendering farm? regards: andrey ps: together with povray came zlib and libpng -- those compiled effortlessly, so a port of those can be considered done :)