[Radiance-general] coherent advice on running Radiance on win32

[Lars O. Grobe]

After all these great contributions, I want to add some thoughts about 
the criterias. First, I also have a mingw-compile installed on the 
Autocad-Dektop I am sitting right now. Performance is not critical here, 
  but it is nice to be able to check a scene or do a quick preview here. 
But if people start to wonder about performance, virtual machines to get 
the latest out of their radiance-windows set up etc, I think it is easy 
to waste time. IMHO, in any serious production environment, it seams to 
be the best to set up a rendering machine and spend all the time and 
efforts on the integration of this machine instead of any workarounds to 
run it in parallel with a windows installation.

1) Your rendering machine has completely different needs. No display 
needed, no graphic cards, no keyboard, no mouse. Instead pure processing 
power (which may lead to high noise and your machine away from your 
desktop). If you set up some queuing and power management, you can have 
it up and running 24/7 and just send render jobs from all desktops. If 
you leave your office, either switch off your desktop or put in an 
openmosix-cd so it can add some computing power to your linux system.


2) Radiance on Linux is very easy to remote-control. In fact, I do all 
my renderings on a machine 2000 km away over a ssh connection (yes, 56K 
modem speed, but ssh allows compression), all my data is in a cvs. 
Control by ssh (with X-forwarding). Choose between the many ways to 
transfer data (either by a mounted volume from a file server which is 
accessed by both desktop and render machine, or by any other transport. 
Ask Schorsch about Rayfronts additional capabilities to remote control jobs.

3) One of the most important point for rendering is stability. I would 
not want to have people start and quit all kinds of apps, log in and 
off, print etc on a windows desktop while I have a rendering runnings 
since four days on the same machine. A dedicated machine allows you to 
have only few, well-tested software in a stable environment.

If you need a REAL integration (without performance drawbacks) use a 
unix-system. I mentioned that Mac OS is a unix-like with most CAD apps 
available. So that is the cute, slim laptop set-up, with cad, radiance 
(the very latest without any workarounds) natively running and at full 
speed. Or take a look at the modelers available for unixes, like Maya, 
Houdini, ... It is not impossible to do 3d on unix.

Really, I see the Radiance/Windows as a nice alternative for people who 
want to do "preflight-checks" on their modeling desktops or do some 
small / fast simulations. In fact, most light studies do not require too 
much calculation and even few of the brand-new features of the latest 
radiance cvs. For those, vmware and other virtualization solutions are 
ok, and the mingw-binaries with the new preview for windows will be 
great. But if processing speed is needed, as in a production workflow, I 
really think that setting up a unix-machine is worth it!