[Radiance-general] proposed feature: interpreting view names in rad

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi,

I am not sure whether this would break anything, but it would be a 
rather useful way of organizing renderings:

At the moment, I can pass a view name to rad using the -v parameter, and 
this will cause exactly one view to be rendered, which must have been 
named in the view= line in the rif file.

Now, this view= line can point to a view file, which may contain more 
then one view. I would have expected rad to render all the views in that 
file, but as -v is defined to render exactly one view, rad takes only 
one of the views defined in the view file and ignores the others.

I would propose to change this behaviour. If I call rad e.g. as

rad -v myview myoctree.oct

it would be very useful if rad would look whether it finds a view= line 
for myview. If it finds one defining one view, render that. If it finds 
one pointing to a view file, render all the views in that view file. If 
I call rad as

rad -v anotherview -v myview myoctree.oct

it should render all views defined in the view= lines for anotherview 
and myview, be it view files or view definitions inside the rif.

One reason this would be helpful is as such: I am currently working on a 
scene, which needs some view-dependent processing. So I have a script 
which does some work, cleans up, creates an octree, creates photon maps, 
and then calls rad. Now I would like to call the same rif-file for all 
of these, as it eventually contains the same information for all 
renderings except the views. And I cannot render all views at once, as I 
have to modify the octree before moving to the next "view group" (this 
translates to rooms in my example).

I am sure that there are other uses for this. What do you think? Is 
there any way people may have used the -v parameter that could imply the 
risk of breaking compatibility by introducing such a change?

Cheers Lars.

-- 
Lars O. Grobe (Mr) :: Research Fellow, Solar Energy Research Institute 
of Singapore SERIS :: National University of Singapore :: 7 Engineering 
Drive 1, Block #E3A-06-35, Singapore 117576 :: 65-6516 5816(Tel) :: 
65-6775 1943 (Fax) :: serlog at nus.edu.sg (E) :: www.seris.sg (W) :: 
Company Registration No: 200604346E

Important: This email is confidential and may be privileged. If you are 
not the intended recipient, please delete it and notify us immediately; 
you should not copy or use it for any purpose, nor disclose its contents 
to any other person. Thank you.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: lars_grobe.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 299 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://radiance-online.org/pipermail/radiance-general/attachments/20090722/f6799abc/lars_grobe.vcf