"George Pantazopoulos" <go### [at] tomyaboutpage> wrote in message 
news:web.45592660a65ea229c0bad8570@news.povray.org...
> Hey thanks for your feedback, Ryan. I agree, my documentation could use 
> more
> work. How do you think I could have made things easier?

Well coming from the Windows side with minimal Unix experience, it took a 
lot of getting my head round just setting everything up. I think I'll put 
some notes together for other similarly minded Windows users. Also there 
will probably be more experienced users who can see what I've done and tell 
me how to do it better.

> My reasoning was to allow flexibility in configuring the Servers. They can
> have widely varying directory structures, but as long as you had a
> PovBaseDir somewhere, you can give that location to pyxrsclient, and any
> necessary scenes and includes could easily be found (and the relevant +L
> entries automatically added to the command line for each Server when tiles
> are rendered). Also, having a unified directory structure makes it much
> easier to clone it for multiple servers when one or more scene files are
> updated (either manually or using rsync).

Having got the second PC going, I think I understand now. I hadn't actually 
realised that all the scene files had to be on both PC's before running the 
client. I naively thought that this would all be magically done for me...

> Can you tell me more about what kind of systems you're running MegaPOV XRS
> on? Also, what kind of renders are you doing?

I've got two PC's, both with Windows XP installed and on a local network. My 
main PC is twice as fast as the other POV-Ray wise, so I'm going to get a 
theoretical 50% boost to processing power just using this. Not sure how the 
speed of the Cygwin compiled executable compares to native though, will have 
to benchmark and optimise if possible.

As for renders, I check on the IRTC topics, start making a scene, and if 
it's complete before the deadline, I enter it. This month's "Complexity" is 
probably going to require all the processing power I can get, if I can think 
of a suitable subject...

> Jaime Vives Piqueres found a way to virtually eliminate radiosity tiling
> artifacts in his MegaPOV XRS renders. As I recall, he uses a two-pass
> method. With a regular copy of MegaPOV he generates the radiosity data at
> lower resolution and scene complexity. Then, he copies the rad data to all
> the servers and does a usual XRS distributed render.

Yeah, saw the thread. Makes sense, I'll give it a go.

> Also, how did you hear about MegaPOV XRS? :-)

It was on the main POV-Ray website. Saw it a while ago and thought I'd give 
it a go some time.

Now I've got it working, I'll see if I can make it abit easier for me to 
use, particularly with keeping scene files in sync. I'm certainly hooked on 
its usefulness...

Ryan

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