[Radiance-general] New rtrace -n option

[Guglielmetti, Robert]

On 12/15/09 1:56 PM, "Robert Guglielmetti" <robert.guglielmetti at nrel.gov>
wrote:

> Hmmm. I downloaded the HEAD, ran makeall, but rtrace gives an unknown option
> error on -n. My rtrace binary is five minutes old, and the rtrace.c file it
> was compiled from is dated Dec 14 00:31. Did I jump on that download a
> little too fast, Greg?

In what should come as no surprise to anyone on this list, this was a user
error situation. Sorry.

$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/rtrace
$ -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  397736 Dec 15 13:09 /usr/local/bin/rtrace
$ which rtrace
$ /usr/local/bin/RAY/rtrace (you idiot)

OK, so that's sorted. But in testing out the -n option, I do notice a
strange behavior. If you have a bogus material definition in your scene
files -- even if it is not referenced in the octree -- using rtrace with the
-n option will throw a fatal error about the material definition and quit.
Again, this is not a material that is actually used in the octree, no ray
would ever need to evaluate the definition; it's an unassigned material that
happens to reference a .cal file that's not on my system. But I compiled an
octree and I ran rpict twice on the same octree. Once without the -n, and
that ran fine. Then I ran the same exact command adding "-n 10" and I got
this error:

rtrace: fatal - cannot find function file "glaz.cal"

I went back and deleted the bogus material from my material file completely,
recompiled, and now rtrace -n works. Not sure what's going on there.

Thank you for this addition, Greg! It's nice to feed rtrace one grid and
watch top automatically fill up with all these rtrace processes!

- Rob G.