xdart - X distributed Abe's raytracer xdart works in conjunction with xdartd to render scenes in the .art format. Not all features listed in the ART manual will work with this program because the version of Abe's raytracer that was modified to run distributed is very stale but hopefully functional. Ordered scanning is the only mode supported. This raytrace is distributed which means that you can use several machines working together to render a single image. Please be sure you know how to use the unix ps and kill commands to kill a background process before you use this program, and be responsible in killing daemons you start up. How to use: By default the program is configured to run on a single machine which is both the client and server. To try out xdart: go to the xdartd directory and type xdartd & go back to the xdart directory and type xdart NEW_GOLD.art How to use multiple servers: Step 1: Figure out which machines you want to be xdart servers and add their network address to xdart.servers xdart.servers has the following format: <port number> <server address> <server address> ... <server address> where port number is any unused legal TCP port and the server addresses list the machines you are going to use. Illegal names are ignored. Step 2: log into each of the servers and start an xdartd running usually just by typing: xdartd & in the xdartd directory, be sure that xdartd.clients has the the same port number as xdart.servers and that the machine you will be running xdart on is listed in xdartd.clients Step 3: Type: xdart NEW_GOLD.art The image should now render using all the machines in xdart.servers If you quit xdart the daemons will reset and continue to run. So you will not have to fire up the daemons every time you rerun xdart. Step 4: Be sure to kill all the daemons on all the servers when you are finished rendering since they consume system resources. To learn how to kill process you put in the background type: man ps man kill Usually I kill xdartd with: % ps -aux | grep xdartd spy 1548 0.0 3.0 1.83M 248K p1 SWN 0:00 xdartd spy 1556 0.0 2.3 1.31M 192K p2 S N 0:00 grep xdartd % kill 1548 More .art files are available via anonymous ftp at castlab.engr.wisc.edu(128.104.52.10) in /pub/art_files Please send comments and suggestions and significant bug reports to: spy@castlab.engr.wisc.edu Abe Megahed Email address: verbose@saavik.cs.wisc.edu Mark Spychalla Secondary Email address: spy@saavik.cs.wisc.edu Mark Spychalla University of Wisconsin - Madison
