[Radiance-general] Re: rholo?

[Greg Ward]

> From: Randolph Fritz <randolph@panix.com>
>
> On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 03:02  PM, Rob Guglielmetti wrote:
>
>>
>>> If I do this at all, I will do as much pre-rendering as I can on the 
>>> fastest system I can fine (which isn't my Mac.)  Is there a sample 
>>> .hdk file I can download for testing display?
>>
>> Have a look in ray/obj/cabin, there are a couple of samples using the 
>> cabin model.  There are makefiles for a day and night scene, running 
>> 'make nholo' at the command line will start an interactive process of 
>> the nighttime scene for example.
>
> I tried it; performance is quite respectable on the fast Pentium 4 in 
> the Baker Lighting Lab.  Navigation, however, is difficult enough that 
> I think I won't be using it for this project; I don't want to try to 
> teach people how to use it under fire.  (I don't think I want to learn 
> how for this project, either!)  Maybe next time...

It takes a bit of getting used to, no question.  If you have a fast 
OpenGL implementation, you'll suffer from a bug in the official 3.5 
version that causes rotation to spin wildly, which is fixed on top of 
trunk.  (I thought it was fixed in the 3.5 release, but I missed a zero 
on the delay time I added between refreshes.)  Once you're used to it, 
though, you'll find rview painful by comparison.

>
> By the way, what is the difference between the glx and ogl drivers?

The glx1 driver is an older version of the ogl driver, which doesn't 
render the scene geometry and use it to reduce multidepth sampling 
errors.  (You'll have to read the holodeck paper to know what I'm 
talking about -- I just added it to radsite at 
<http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/papers>.)  There's also a "glx" driver 
that doesn't get built by default as it appears to be broken.  It draws 
a Gouraud-shaded triangle mesh instead of the Vornoi regions of the ogl 
and glx1 drivers.

-Greg