[Radiance-general] Radiance animation questions

[Georg Mischler]

Zack Rogers wrote:

> i seem to trip up the curb, have several neck spasms, and stare
> at a wall at one point....

You may also want to set the exposure to a fixed value, resp. one
for exterior and one for interior shots.


> 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.

That's the easiest way I can think of.


> 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.

Ranimate is one of the really hard ones to port to non-posix
platforms, which is probably the reason why the folks doing it
for DR left it at "good enough".


> 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.

Should be there. Are you sure you installed the additional
support package before building? Because otherwise you're missing
out on the tifflib, which will cause other stuff in the same
directory not to get built (even if it doesn't actually use the
tifflib).


>  BTW - pinterp does not seem to work in the
> windows version either.

Try to make sure that the file paths you feed to pinterp are as
short as possible (ie. use relative paths). This is fixed in
HEAD, but many of the picture manipulation programs used to
suffer from buffer overflows when comand lines got too long.


> 4.) So, we then tried to install the last official release 3.5

Use your HEAD! ;)


> 5.) Using an ambfile does not seem to be doing much for my animation
> times?

I'm not sure about that, but the ambient file may have limited
savings effects with just one ambient bounce. You're also moving
around a lot, so that most of your previous ambient values will
be irrelevant for the part of the scene you're looking at a few
frames later.


> 6.) Any suggestions on the parameters used?

You'll have to bribe Jack to reveal some of his secrets... ;)


> 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?

Some future versions of Radout and dxf2rad may do this (with the
new mesh primitive), but it's not an urgent issue for me as long
as Rayfront still uses Radiance 3.1/3.2.


> 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.

You'd need to do oversized renderings and filter them down to
avoid the particle look in distant patterns. On the other hand,
there's no real point in mapping a wood grain pattern to surfaces
that you never look at from up close.


>   Also, I would like to map the
> textures better onto these surfaces rather than using xgrain,
> ygrain...etc.  How could this be done?

There's an "arbmap.cal" included with Rayfront for that (and it
should also be in the archives here somewhere for those who don't
have that).


-schorsch

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/