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

[Jack de Valpine]

A view file is supposed to represent one (1) view. The last line of the 
view file is considered to be the view spec.  Considering a view file to 
be a collection of multiple views is counter productive.

It seems to me that there are a few ways to do what you want:

   1. create multiple rif files with each one representing a "view
      group" and containing multiple "view=" lines, note this is really
      one of the things that rif file is for, that is to create coherent
      groupings of views with respect to a set of
      geometry/materials/lighting as defined in an octree....
   2. enhance your script to include a separate "view group" file, the
      script can parse the view group file and pass the relevant views
      to the rif file, in essence building a rif file on the fly....
   3. ranimate, as Thomas suggests, you could probably do something with
      the ANIMATE parameter for ranimate pointing to a script to produce
      the correctly modified octree and use a VIEWFILE with all your
      views in it.

-Jack

Thomas Bleicher wrote:
> Have you considered using ranimate here?
>
> Thomas
>
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Lars O. Grobe<lars.grobe at nus.edu.sg> wrote:
>   
>> 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
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# Jack de Valpine
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#
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