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Hi,

I've recently added a first cut at dumping PABST ray tree information from Manta using the Raydumper renderer. Do the following:

bin/manta -np 1 -renderer "raydumper(-fname <filename> -renderer <r> - shadows <sa>)"

where

filename == output file ("raydump.out")
r == the renderer to use ("raytracer")
sa == shadow algorithm to use ("hard").

or just specify raydumper as the renderer and use the default values. It will fire up Manta, render one frame of the scene, and quit. The tree isn't quite right because all rays share the same root (i.e., the tree's actual structure isn't captured), but we can roughly reconstruct it based on ray type/depth and ray parameter information. To that end, I've created a very simple OpenGL PABST tree viewer, which is available here:

https://code.sci.utah.edu/svn/people/cgribble/treeview/trunk/

With the limited functionality, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, but here's a legend:

red == primary rays
dark gray == shadow rays
blue == other rays (secondary, tertiary, etc.)
white == rays that don't hit anything in the scene, truncated to unit length.

As I said, the viewer is quite primitive, but it does allow interaction (Solomon's version does not). Someday we should add the ability to inspect certain groups of rays, certain types of rays, certain depths, ... That list will go on for quite some time. Anyway, check it out if you're interested; maybe it'll grow into something.

C

P.S. If you're interested in instrumenting your own code with PABST ray tree dumps, note that the versions of RayTree.{h,cc} in the Manta repository and/or the treeview repository have endian-free read/write for porting data files between platforms. I've tested the routines on 32-bit PPC and Intel Darwin, and 64-bit Linux, and everything seems to be working fine. If we're actually going to standardize on PABST, we should figure out where to put the "official" version of the source, or better yet, libraries for linking dso-style or something.

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• [MANTA] Rudimentary viewer for PABST output, Christiaan Paul Gribble, 10/05/2006

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