Am 02.08.2014 10:05, schrieb Christian Baun:

> I want to install POV-ray on a cluster of Debian machines.
>
> Compiling POV-ray 3.7 worked very well, but now I don't know what is the best
> option to use multiple nodes with POV-ray together.
>
> Some projects like MPIPOV [1] or other projects [2][3][4] look dead. Broken
> links, no update since >10 years...
>
> [1] http://www.ce.unipr.it/research/parma2/povray/povray.html
> [2] http://pvmpov.sourceforge.net/
> [3] http://www.wozzeck.net/images/pmp/
> [4] http://www.verrall.demon.co.uk/mpipov/
>
> Approach 1-4 are all related to patches which are either not available any more
> or look quite outdated and incompatible with POV-ray 3.7.

Indeed, forget all of the above.


> This approach [5] looks quite helpful because it is not related to any patches.
> It just splits the image calculation by row.
>
> [5] http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~wrooney/present/povclust.html

This approach is problematic with radiosity, creating visible artifacts 
at the seams.


> What is the best option to create a POV-ray cluster?

My personal suggestion would be to use UberPOV, with radiosity sample 
caching disabled (effectively using stochastic sampling for diffuse 
illumination), a different random seed on each machine, and letting all 
machines render the very same complete scene. The resulting images can 
then be averaged via imageMagick or the like to reduce the noise in the 
images.


> Is there any project which makes use of MPI and is up to date?

If you find any, let us know.

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