85415c230805112013h3e4a7fd4i96952c50849aa60e@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">[Adding the Manta mailing list to cc.]

Hi,

Obviously Manta targets multi-core/shared memory computers rather than clusters-- every so often there is some interest in cluster support on the mailing list, but I'm not aware of any high performance ray tracers based on MPI today. Systems like OpenRT use their own communication protocols. Manta's implementation can be roughly divided between the parallel pipeline that coordinates individual threads (see RTRT.cc) and the modular rendering stack that creates ray packets and then traces and shades the scene. You might want to take a look at the image traversers and load balancers.

For animation using .obj key frames take a look at the triangleSceneViewer scene: "bin/manta -scene lib/libscene_triangleSceneViewer.dylib" You can specify several key frames with separate "-model" arguments on the command line or in a shell script.

Others on this mailing list might have suggestions too.

Abe

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Biagio Cosenza <cosenza@dia.unisa.it> wrote:

Hello,
I'm Biagio Cosenza, a Phd Student of the University of Salerno
(Italy), actually involved in a E.C. project at the University of
Stuttgart (Germany).

I'm developing a parallel ray tracer working on a cluster of
workstations (based on MPI).
However, I'm going to change my serial implementation with Manta.

I've two basic questions.

1 - I'm thinking to have something like a simple interface between the
serial and the parallel stuffs, in order to easily change the serial
implementation.
In short, starting from the Manta-Skeleton, I want to implement a
method (based on Manta) with a similar signature:

 # rendering of the tile in the given buffer img
 void renderTile(Image *img, int x1, int x2, int y1, int y2)

For your experience and knowledge of Manta, is this the right approach?
Where do I have to start looking for (classes)?
Suggestions are welcomed...

2 - Test scenes. I need some animated test scenes. I've found in an
old svn version (until version 1613) that there was a BART reader, but
it is not more available. Does it works with i.e. BART robots scene?
I saw and tested an obj importer, but is not clear how to import
Wald's animated test scene with keyframes
(http://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/animrep). I suppose that I should
implement a callback.


I'm sorry for the very looooong email :(

Thanks in advance for comments, suggestions and/or other.
Regards, Biagio

--
Biagio Cosenza
ISISLab, Dip. di Informatica ed Applicazioni "Renato M. Capocelli"
Universita' degli Studi di Salerno
http://www.dia.unisa.it/~cosenza