🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bz5rC9.1A9@rice.edu> steve@ion.rice.edu writes:
>>
>>For the last few days I've been working on a molecule display app using  
>>renderman. It's now working perfectly, with one exception. Whenever I try to  
>>draw a large molecule (300-400 spheres), renderman chokes. I get a message on  
>>the console about renderman losing it's connection to the window server or  
>>something. After digging around the filesystem for a while, I located the place  
>>where the renderman daemon writes ITS errors, and discovered a variety of  
>>messages all boiling down to "out of memory", including some that explain why  
>>it can't connect to the window server (memory problems again). Thinking back, I  
>>remember similar problems when I tried to put too many spheres in when  
>>debugging Plot3D.   Is there any way to increase the amount of memory the  
>>renderman daemon has available to it???  NeXT's complete lack of documentation  
>>doesn't help the situation at all!    Any advice at all would be greatly  
>>appreciated!



Well, there's documentation, and then there's documentation.  I'm staring
at some mighty fine 3.0 paper doc right now, but unfortunately, not everything
has a man page...

Anyway, given the relative fragility of qrman (compared to prman), I'm not
surprised it's choking.  I can't believe there are any compiled in limits
for the amount of geometry, so you might try this on a machine that has
a good amount of memory and lots of swap space and see if it dies in the 
same way (i.e. same size database).  I'm killing qrman pretty repeatedly
these days, when I give it badly shaped polygons, and it wedges it well
enough make it that I have to reboot.  We can only hope 3.1 has a more
robust qrman. 

-- 

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu

In article <Bz5rC9.1A9@rice.edu> steve@ion.rice.edu (Steve Ludtke) writes:
> 
> For the last few days I've been working on a molecule display app using  
> renderman. It's now working perfectly, with one exception. Whenever I try to  
> draw a large molecule (300-400 spheres), renderman chokes. I get a message on  
> the console about renderman losing it's connection to the window server or  
> something. After digging around the filesystem for a while, I located the place  
> where the renderman daemon writes ITS errors, and discovered a variety of  
> messages all boiling down to "out of memory", including some that explain why  
> it can't connect to the window server (memory problems again). Thinking back, I  
> remember similar problems when I tried to put too many spheres in when  
> debugging Plot3D.   Is there any way to increase the amount of memory the  
> renderman daemon has available to it???  NeXT's complete lack of documentation  
> doesn't help the situation at all!    Any advice at all would be greatly  
> appreciated!

This is a bug in the QRman server- A real pain.  You can't really play around  
with large data sets because all of a sudden, QRman can't handle it anymore and  
messes up the window server, and woops... there goes the window server!! Really  
annoying, and kinda makes you wonder how robust and useful QRman really is. I  
haven't been able to do anything 'real' on it yet!! 

BTW, Dave Springer @ NeXT is 'aware of this problem,' and has been trying to  
track it down for the last month or so. My bet is we're not gonna see any real  
fix before 3.1.

-----------------------------------------------------
Patrick Heynen 		Program of Computer Graphics
			Cornell University

patrick@yabba.graphics.cornell.edu

While there's a little attention focused on prman and qrman I'll insert
my favorite question into the discussion:

How on earth do you create shadows with prman???  The basic idea is
simple, create a Z-buffer image, use RiMakeShadow() to convert it to a
shadow map, and use the shadow map in a light source shader with a
shadow input (shadowspot, etc...).  Everything breaks down at the
first step though, since it looks like NeXT left out the ability to
write Z-buffer images!  Thus - no shadows, no photorealism, no
nothing.  I'm very frustrated about this...

So has anybody worked out the technique?  I'm completely stumped after
wasting hours and days trying to get it going.  NeXT's
vapor-documentation doesn't help of course...

Shane