[Radiance-general] Radiance animation questions

[Zack Rogers]

Hello group,

I am attempting my first full blown Radiance animation and have several 
related questions.  This link has a rough version of the animation, done 
with -ab 0.

http://www.archenergy.com/downloads/pub/images/Radiance/walkthrough_init3.mov

and yes, i seem to trip up the curb, have several neck spasms, and stare 
at a wall at one point....all have since been fixed but this leads to my 
first question.

1.) What programs do people use to produce animation paths?  I initially 
wanted to use rshow but couldn't get it working on our Suse 8.2.  I 
understand programs like maya, studio vis, form-z?? have the ability to 
generate these animations paths but are too much (expensive) for what I 
need.  It would be nice to be able to just export my spline path from 
autoCAD and then have the ability to adjust frames/sec, slow down 
portions of the path, and adjust the view direction throughout.

2.) There are portions of this path that I want to slow down and I 
wanted to use pinterp to interpolate some extra frames.  How can I 
generate a z-buffer file for a view without recreating the picture?  I 
thought I could just run it at very low settings if nothing else.  And 
yes, I am running ranimate using the windows version (our linux machines 
were filled up with CFD calcs at go time and I was forced to use our NT 
machines - btw: ranimate does not work on XP - error "Windows socket 
operations not supported") and it is giving errors using INTERPOLATE and 
MBLUR which would have created the zbf files automatically.  Hence, I 
was planning on using pinterp afterwards to achieve interpolation but 
now I have no z-buffer files.  which leads to my next questions....

3.) Where is pinterp?  I just installed the HEAD version on our linux 
machines (yes, its been a while since I last dabbled in the linux 
release) and i can't find pinterp.  It shows up in the man pages but not 
in the bin directory.  BTW - pinterp does not seem to work in the 
windows version either.

4.) So, we then tried to install the last official release 3.5 and it 
gave us a bunch of errors.  The error log is here.  Help!

http://www.archenergy.com/downloads/pub/images/Radiance/installLog.txt

5.) Using an ambfile does not seem to be doing much for my animation 
times?  I was expecting a big decrease in calc time the further i got 
into my animation but at about 5/6 through it has not sped up much.  It 
has been building the ambient file the whole time, although it is only 
7MB after roughly 1000 frames, which seems too small (10 panoramic views 
I've been running on a different machine already has an ambient file of 
7MB).  Here is what one of my ranfiles looks like:

DIRECTORY = anim/walkthrough_sect2
VIEWFILE = anim_path2.pts
START = 311
END = 622
OCTREE = octrees/bc.oct
RESOLUTION = 768
render = -av 2.5 2.5 2.5 -ar 46 -aa .1 -ad 4096 -as 2048 -ab 1 -af 
ambfiles/bc.amb
render = -dp 512 -ds .3 -dj 0 -dt 0.2 -dr 1 -dc .5
render = -lr 6 -lw .002 -sj .9 -st 0.01

6.) Any suggestions on the parameters used?  I am no expert on 
optimizing parameters.  These parameters give me a fairly good image 
with about 1/2 hour calc time (which was the speed needed to meet 
deadline).  But there are still a few splotches, the light from my 
electric lights is a little too crisp, and I am not too happy with the 
specular reflections.  You can see the quality I am getting in one of 
the final images here:

http://www.archenergy.com/downloads/pub/images/Radiance/frame741.tif

7.) As can be seen, I have many curved surfaces in this model most of 
which have been faceted.  I would like to use a function to smooth the 
shading on these.  Is there any way to do this given the geometry is 
already built?  Something like the Phong shading -s option in gensurf or 
maybe with the new mesh primitive???  I apologize for my ignorance on 
this topic, I rarely require this much detail.  I'm imagining a modifier 
or something I could give to the polygons I want to smooth over.

8.) I was initially mapping wood grain onto a lot of the interior wood 
surfaces but given the varying distances of the wood I could never get 
it to look very good.  When it looked good up close, it looks like 
particle board far away.  And when it looks good far away (ie larger 
scale) it looks like a zebra up close.  I would like to have the grain 
at the correct scale, but don't want it looking like particle board (i'm 
assuming this is just cause there are limited number of pixels to 
display this detail).  What strategies have others used to get a good 
looking pattern at varying distances?  Also, I would like to map the 
textures better onto these surfaces rather than using xgrain, 
ygrain...etc.  How could this be done?

Sorry for the long e-mail and so many questions clumped into one and the 
various tangents my questions may have took.

Best Regards,
Zack

-- 
Zack Rogers
Staff Engineer
Architectural Energy Corporation
2540 Frontier Avenue, Suite 201
Boulder, CO 80301 USA

tel (303)444-4149 ext.235
fax (303)444-4304
http://www.archenergy.com