[Radiance-general] New rtrace -n option

[Greg Ward]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the feedback.

The bogus material error is caused by the function preload_objs(),  
which goes through and loads all the auxiliary data (including .cal  
files) for all scene objects, whether referenced or not.  This  
function is called by any of the shared-memory parallel execution  
modes to maximize static shared data, thereby minimizing system memory  
use.  The same thing would happen with the -PP option.

Cheers,
-Greg

> From: "Guglielmetti, Robert" <Robert.Guglielmetti at nrel.gov>
> Date: December 15, 2009 2:36:37 PM PST
>
> On 12/15/09 1:56 PM, "Robert Guglielmetti" <robert.guglielmetti at nrel.gov 
> >
> wrote:
>
>> Hmmm. I downloaded the HEAD, ran makeall, but rtrace gives an  
>> unknown option
>> error on -n. My rtrace binary is five minutes old, and the rtrace.c  
>> file it
>> was compiled from is dated Dec 14 00:31. Did I jump on that  
>> download a
>> little too fast, Greg?
>
> In what should come as no surprise to anyone on this list, this was  
> a user
> error situation. Sorry.
>
> $ ls -l /usr/local/bin/rtrace
> $ -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  397736 Dec 15 13:09 /usr/local/bin/rtrace
> $ which rtrace
> $ /usr/local/bin/RAY/rtrace (you idiot)
>
> OK, so that's sorted. But in testing out the -n option, I do notice a
> strange behavior. If you have a bogus material definition in your  
> scene
> files -- even if it is not referenced in the octree -- using rtrace  
> with the
> -n option will throw a fatal error about the material definition and  
> quit.
> Again, this is not a material that is actually used in the octree,  
> no ray
> would ever need to evaluate the definition; it's an unassigned  
> material that
> happens to reference a .cal file that's not on my system. But I  
> compiled an
> octree and I ran rpict twice on the same octree. Once without the - 
> n, and
> that ran fine. Then I ran the same exact command adding "-n 10" and  
> I got
> this error:
>
> rtrace: fatal - cannot find function file "glaz.cal"
>
> I went back and deleted the bogus material from my material file  
> completely,
> recompiled, and now rtrace -n works. Not sure what's going on there.
>
> Thank you for this addition, Greg! It's nice to feed rtrace one grid  
> and
> watch top automatically fill up with all these rtrace processes!
>
> - Rob G.