Yo Budge, I've CC'ed the manta mailing list, because they may be able
to help with any questions that I can't get to.

On Dec 20, 2007, at 11:08 AM, Brian Budge wrote:

> Hey Bigler -
>
> How's it going?   Everything okay  in the ol' SLC? I've been
> looking at
> Manta, mainly because Phillip Slussalek suggested it, and before
> that I
> didn't know that the source was available :)
>
> It seems like a super cool project.  I am trying to run a couple of
> benchmarks on it, and maybe use it for a side experiment in my
> upcoming
> paper.  I saw in the documents how to run it with the sceneviewer,
> but I
> really just need to do batch rendering.  In fact, if I could use it to
> benchmark the path tracer with X samples per pixel at AxB
> resolution using
> the kd-tree, I'd be stoked to do that.  Is this possible?  I have
> specific
> models in mind which are, unfortunately, proprietary (I'm sure you
> SCI folks
> know how that is).

manta can run in "batch" mode.

bin/manta -res 1024x768 -imagedisplay "file(-type tga)" -bench 1 0

This will render a single frame and write it out to a file.

If you want to render using more than one sampler per pixel, you will
need a different pixel sampler:

bin/manta -pixelsampler "jitter(-numberOfSamples 16)" ...

I'm not sure what the state of the path tracer is, but you can invoke
it by changing the renderer:

bin/manta -renderer pathtracer ..

There are certain configurations of the pixel sampler and image
traverser that can change the performance of the path tracer.  I'll
let other chime in.

> Also, just to see how crap my own ray tracer is, can I enable the
> kd-tree
> for the viewer?  My own kd-tree ray tracer without sse is about the
> same
> speed as tte DynBVH that you guys have, but I would guess that your
> kd-tree
> is a good deal faster.

I assume you are using the triangleSceneViewer:

bin/manta -scene "lib/libscene_triangleSceneViewer(-KDTree)"

Just check out the .cc file for more options.

James