"Ryan Bennitt" <rya### [at] lycoscouk> wrote:
> Woohoo, after much pain working out how to use Cygwin (mostly working out
> which packages I needed installed), I've finally got both server and client
> working on my main PC. Now to remember how I did it so I can get the server
> working on my second PC...
>
> Just one thing that took me ages to work out, I couldn't get it working
> until I stuck all my scene files under /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/scenes
> (Which translates to C:cygwinusrlocalsharepovray-3.6scenes under
> Windows). What was the reasoning behind this? All my scene files are
> normally stored on my D: drive (/cygdrive/d/...) where there's more space,
> but XRS seems to complain if it doesn't find a folder named "scenes" in the
> path.
>
> Otherwise, this seems like a very cool addition to pov. Now to eliminate
> those radiosity tiling artifacts...
>
> Ryan
>

Hey thanks for your feedback, Ryan. I agree, my documentation could use more
work. How do you think I could have made things easier? Though I'd prefer to
solve problems in the newsgroup (so others could benefit), feel free to
email me directly.

MegaPOV XRS needs a directory setup that includes a scenes/ folder (the
folder above scenes/ is called the PovBaseDir). My setups also have certain
other folders under PovBaseDir, such as LightSysIV/ include/ imagemaps/ and
fonts/

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).

Can you tell me more about what kind of systems you're running MegaPOV XRS
on? Also, what kind of renders are you doing?
You may be able to avoid recompiling on cygwin (a slow process) and get away
with copying the binary to the new computer and running it, provided that it
also has cygwin installed. I'm hazy on the details at the moment, but you
probably don't have to install all the libraries on the other machines. I'd
start with a minimal cygwin install on the subsequent machines and see what
happens.

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. There's another thread
on here talking about it. If you have trouble finding it, let me know.

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

Best,
George Pantazopoulos
http://www.gammaburst.net

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