[Radiance-general] rtcontrib output crashes preview, finder

[Andy McNeil]

Hi John,

I find that completely black hdr images consistently crash preview.  It will also crash finder if you use finder in one of the modes that show a preview of the image like cover flow or the columns. 

Also, I've never been able to get Axel's command for random color images to work on a mac the way it is written in the tutorial.  When I try it rcalc waits patiently for input that doesn't exist.  But you can't add -n because then recno is invalid.  If you give it simple input using cnt (ie. cnt 1 | rcalc ) it doesn't work because all the values are seeded with the same number (recno is 1 every time).  Instead I used the $RANDOM variable to seed rcalc's rand function like so:

pcomb $(for i in {000..145}; do \
		echo "-c $(echo $RANDOM | rcalc -e '$1=rand($1);$2=rand($1+.3);$3=rand($1+.7)') \
		images/patches/p$(printf "%03d" $i).hdr"; done)>  images/sky_colourcomb.hdr  


Admittedly this solution is not elegant.  If it's elegance we're after we could use the new capability in dctimestep (which wasn't available when Axel wrote his tutorial):
cnt 145 | rcalc -e '$1=rand(recno);$2=rand(recno+.3);$3=rand(recno+.7)' | dctimestep images/patches/p%03d.hdr >  images/sky_colourcomb.hdr  

Best,
Andy

On Dec 9, 2010, at 11:24 PM, Greg Ward wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> The "recno" variable should work in rcalc, if that's what you're talking about.  I use it all the time.  The Finder isn't very bright when it comes to HDR images -- long headers may confuse it.
> 
> Use the new dctimestep rather than pcomb to combine images.  If you don't have the new version of dctimestep, use the -h option to pcomb to avoid ridiculous header lengths.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Greg
> 
>> From: John Ford <johnford at bb3.net.au>
>> Date: December 9, 2010 10:04:50 PM PST
>> 
>> Thomas, 
>> 
>> Got it working. 
>> 
>> In the meantime discovered that date in OSX doesn't return nanoseconds, despite Unix date returning nanoseconds. Also, I don't think 'recno' works on OSX. 
>> 
>> John. 
> 
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