[Radiance-general] Re: colorpict modifiers in instances and frozen octrees?

[Greg Ward]

Lars O. Grobe wrote:
>
> I use a makefile to create a lot of frozen octrees using colorpict 
> modifiers
> (via aliases). These octrees are than used as instances to build a 
> part of a
> building, which is than transformed into a frozen octree. So  I want 
> to get
> frozen octrees for all major parts of my scene which should be useable 
> on
> their own, without dependencies on other files.
>
> My makefile than runs rpict on the octree, and I get a nice image.... 
> but I
> don't see any image mappings.... I also don't get any error or 
> warnings (I
> was used to get "image xxx uses yyy kB" when I used image map patterns 
> so
> far).
>
> Are the image maps included in a frozen octree? Do I need any special 
> switch
> in rpict to make colorpicts visible (I use just vp vd at the moment)? 
> Is
> there anything special when using alias-modifiers in instances (i get 
> my
> geometry from dxf2rad, so for each object, I define a file object.mat 
> which
> contains just the aliases refering to material definitions in a global 
> file
> project.mat).
>
> Thank You, CU, Lars.

In general, it is a good idea to make the picture references local when 
you create your model (or in a local subdirectory), then move/copy the 
pictures/subdirectories along with the frozen octree to a library 
location for convenient access.  As long as this library location is 
included in your RAYPATH environment variable, Radiance will be able to 
find both the frozen octree and any pictures it refers to in that 
directory.

This same trick works for scene files -- you can refer to oft-used 
scene descriptions that exist in your private (or public) library 
directory, and these scene descriptions can include any geometry they 
need in their local directory or subdirectories via !xform commands 
they contain.  This was accomplished by a change that came out with 
3.0, where xform searches directories in the RAYPATH variable rather 
than simply looking in the process' local directory.  It's actually a 
huge advantage to the way it used to work, but you have to be aware of 
it!

-Greg