[Radiance-general] Rendering Panoramas

[Rob Guglielmetti]

On 27 Nov 2002 at 1:14, Lars Grobe wrote:

> BTW, do you know about good ressources on using make to do rendering?
> I know the example files from radsite, and I know the gnu-make
> documentation, but is there anybody who has done some more work on
> this? I am developing my own makefile templates at the moment, but I
> have still lots of problems as some aspects of radiance differ from
> the standard build process.

Hmmm.  Using make to do your renderings?  This is interesting.  I 
remember Raphael showing some examples of his make-based stuff 
at the Workshop, and thought that was interesting.  Being a UNIX 
newbie I barely understand makefile scripts that *other* people wrote, 
never thought of doing my own.  

Question:  Why aren't you using rad?  

rad does a lot of expert-level (program author-level) thinking about 
your model for you, and sets a lot of the myriad switches correctly, 
based on three global assumptions: "quality, detail, and variability".  
(see radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/refer/rad.pdf for the full lowdown.) 

I have been building shell scripts around rad and it's working ok for the 
moment.  I am in the midst of rewriting a script to better serve my 
needs, as sometimes the rad rendering pipeline is not what what you 
need, but the ability of rad to intelligently set rendering parameters for 
you is a powerful one, and can be (ugh, I hate this use of the word...) 
"leveraged" in your shell scrips even if you simply use it to determine 
those parameters.  You could have rad determine the rendering 
parameters and pipe it to a "settings variable".  Then call rpict or 
rtrace or whatever and reference the settings via the @optfile 
statement.  You can even tweak the settings with the RENDER= 
line(s) in your rif file, which can be manipulated by the shell script with 
sed, or whatever, and... well you get the idea.

I'm interested to hear everyone's thoughts on the use of make vs. 
shell scripts.  Since I'm more of a user than a programmer, I 
gravitated to shell scripts because they are really just regurgitated 
commands, which is the way I tend to think.  But if the "next level" is 
make, then I'm all ears.  What are you all using out there in the real 
world?  
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       Rob Guglielmetti
     rpg777@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rpg777
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