POV-Ray: www.povray.org
Suzuki's Density File Extension Patch: staff.aist.go.jp/r-suzuki/e/povray/iso/df_body.htm
Leigh Orf's Research Page: research.orf.cx
U. of I. Convective Modeling Group: redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AOS/home.html
NCOMMAS Model: www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/lwicker/public_html/commas.html
mjpeg tools: mjpeg.sourceforge.net
GeoWall: www.geowall.org
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Live From the Field
Great Article
On November 18th, 2004 Dennis (not verified) says:
Hi just wanted to say thanks for the artcle about povray
But i noted leigh orf That you have made your own cluster right?
WELL HOW DO YOU DO IT ??????????????
Wouldnt it be a great idea for an upcomming aticle about network rendering with linux because i REALLY would like to se an toturial on this subject .
May be also some more links and articles about Opensource 3D
Im SO exited abou suns looking Glass project
Ps (say it loud) WHAT DO WE WANT ????
WE WANT ASSBLOWING 3D GRAPHICS ON OUR LINUXSYSTEMS
Building a cluster
On December 30th, 2004 orf says:
Dennis,
Many vendors will put together a cluster for you (the hardware side). If you are looking to put together a bunch of PCs you have already, this is not too difficult so long as you have a network switch. The software side of things is a bit more involved. Most software does not take advantage of clusters, and you have to specifically write applications that take advantage of the distributed memory architecture.
If you want to do network rendering, you can use Maya but it will cost you big time. MPI-Povray is an offshot of Povray 3.1g which works on clusters but I don't believe development is occuring with it. The whole reason I modified the PoVRay code was because there simply wasn't an out-of-the-box solution for me.
I read somewhere recently (probably slashdot) that some video cards can be directly accessed on a cluster to do rendering instead of just the computer's CPU. I have no experience with this and I believe it is somewhat new technology (an probably requires a lot of pretty spiffy graphics cards).
Leigh Orf
video cards as processers
On November 25th, 2005 Anonymous (not verified) says:
I read a new hardware article in Popular Science that reminded me of this comment. The Ageia PhysX Processor is a PCI card that is designed to make games run better. It would take the load of calculating the 'PhysX' of the game off of the CPU. While this isnt exactly graphics rendering, it looks like it could be easily adapted to do many other operations. either way, it would'nt be cheap, $250-$300.
also i found this on google, http://totalcontrolsolutions.com/viewProd243.html
from what i can tell, these single board computers that hook up to pci could do the same as a very small cluster if you put several on 1 mother board. they may not be very fast but their cheap and pci bus speeds beat ethernet hands down.
How does it compare with what Matlab renders?
On November 8th, 2004 Ron-Nov8 (not verified) says:
Hi, Leigh,
Nice article! It makes me buy the journel. I'm really going to explore it to render my 3D scientific data. However, I'm wondering how this compares with what Matlab renders, besides "free",able-to-customizing.
Thank you.
also thank the editor for choosing such a wonderful topic!
Matlab
On December 30th, 2004 orf says:
Ron,
Thanks for the nice comments. This is indeed cool stuff!
Unfortunatley I have no recent experience with Matlab and have never used it to render stuff. PoVRay is very powerful and customizable and if you are doing isosurfaces, I would highly recommend it.
In the scientific world there are a myriad of data formats and there is a very good chance no matter what program you use (free or proprietary) it will involve at least a little bit of coding and/or tweaking.
Leigh Orf