In article <3caf701a$1@news.povray.org> , "George Pantazopoulos" 
<the### [at] attbicom> wrote:

> Thank you for answering, Thorsten
>     I asked this question because I have been comtemplating writing my own
> program to control multiple machines running POV-Ray, until I stumbled onto
> the radiosity problem. I've read the overview in the docs of how 3.5 handles
> radiosity, but can you show me where to read about this in much more depth?
> Is it possible to get POVRay to output octree data?

Yes, it is.  It has the extension ".rca" and contains a dump of the octree use
when continuing a trace.  You can check it is the 3.1 source code for now, in
radiosity.c functions called ot_read_file and ot_save_tree are used (you find
them in octree.c).  In 3.5 you can also access the reading and writing
directly, see section "6.11.11.2.15 Save and load radiosity data".  However, I
have never really checked how much space this data will take.  If you render
the scene at a lower resolution and then transfer this file to all computers
to to the final render you may be able to work around the lack of a shared
octree and still get a half way reasonable radiosity, but it will most likely
not help a lot (as far as speed is concerned) as you have to generate this
file on a single computer first....

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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