Lightscape User Guide

14 Rendering

To ray trace an area:

1.

Click the Ray Trace Area tool

Display | Ray Trace Area.

or choose

2.

Click and drag to select the portion of the

Graphic window you want to ray trace.

The results of the ray trace operation are displayed on the screen but cannot be saved to a file.

Rendering Large Jobs

Lightscape also provides two batch rendering utilities. lsrender renders the radiosity solution using

OpenGL and lsray renders images using the ray tracer. You typically use batch shell scripts and batch utilities for large rendering jobs, but it is possible to run initial tests at a lower resolution in Lightscape before beginning a batch rendering process. For more information, see Appendix B, “Batch

Processing Utilities.”

All Lightscape renderers can create resulting images in any resolution. They can also be antialiased to produce higher-quality output. For information about creating views, see “Viewing the Model” on page 29. For information about animations, see

Chapter 15, “Animation.” simultaneous ray tracing and OpenGL rendering of multiple views or animation frames. You can also increase the ray tracing speed of single views by using each node on your network to render a portion of the view.

Note: The functionality of the Lightscape command line utilities lsrad (for radiosity processing), lsray (for ray traced image rendering), and lsrender (for OpenGL image rendering) is fully supported in LSNet.

For more information about LSnet, see Appendix C,

“LSnet.”

Rendering Across a Network

LSnet™ is a batch processing utility you can use to split the processing of images across multiple CPUs or across multiple computers on a network.

LSnet distributes the functionality of the Lightscape command line utilities (batch rendering and radiosity processing), thereby decreasing the time it takes to accomplish image rendering proportionally to the number of CPUs available.

You can perform radiosity processing of different

Lightscape files simultaneously, or you can perform

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