Normal RendView

Finally, let's have a look at some examples. If you have nice calling examples which you find useful for a beginner and you would like to have them added here, please e-mail me.

Please have a look at how to pass arguments using the environment variables (RENDVIEWARGS,...); there is an example in quick start chapter and it is really easy to figure out.

Note that you may always pass -help to RendView no matter how many other args you pass. So, when you have written a lengthy cmd line and do not know how to go on, just append -help (or --help, that does not matter) and hit enter if you wish to get the help screen. You may use -l-help to get help about the local task source's parameters only, or -Ld-help for the LDR task driver interface, etc. Yust make sure you are not inside a section block (-xy-{ ...) when adding -help.

First you need a renderers.par file as well as a filters.par (you do not need the latter if you do not want to filter any frames); examples are distributed with RendView or you may copy the ones from the quick start or component data base chapter.
In any case you have to modify these files to fit your needs.
I will assume that you have the render descs povray3.5 and povray3.1g as well as the mysterious glowfilter filter desc.

Okay, let's first consider the following case: You have the files scene.pov, mycolors.inc (used by scene.pov as an example for an additional file, just like texture.png, etc.) as well as a lot of frame files frame-0000.pov up to frame-0200.pov which #include "scene.pov".
Say you want to render all these with POVRay 3.5 so that the output frames are frame-0000.png up to frame-0200.png. Then, you may call

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet

(-ld-r-quiet is used to suppress POVRay output on the console.)

Now, let's say we modified the frames 52, 53 and 104 (you may do that using touch(1) and we want to re-render only those. Simply execute:

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet -l-cont

If you did not modify any pov files, RendView will launch no renderer. Do not get confused by errors telling you
Local: Access check failed on render input file "frame-0201.pov": No such file or directory
This is normal as you did not specify the number of frames and does not yield to failure.

If you want to re-render frames 30..39 you can use:

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet -l-f0=30 -l-n=10

If you want to re-render frames 30..39 as well as 55..66 and frame 101 using one single call, you may execute:

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet -l-30:10-rd=povray3.5 -l-55:11-rd=povray3.5 -l-101:1-rd=povray3.5 -verbose=-all

Especially note that the option -l-rd is no longer present and hence the master frame info's action is not to render anything. Just the three specified per-frame blocks render the frames.
The oprion -verbose=-all suppresses nearly all verbose messages (two lines for each frame stay) so that you can see more easily what frames actually get rendered. (You can pass -verbose=-all -dumptask=-z to actually switch off all verbose output except one startup and one exit message but that is not recommended.)

Okay, now let's finally post-process the frames 0..29 using the glowfilter which we have to pass the arguments -recurse 2 -glowfact=0.177:

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -l-fd=glowfilter -l-f-args="-recurse 2 -glowfact=0.177" -l-n=30

This will produce the files frame-0000-f.png up to frame-0029-f.png.
Alternatively, you could have used -l-r-ofpattern=frame-%04d instead of -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov (note the missing file name extension).

Of course, you could have done that right from the beginning using

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet -l-0:30-{ -fd=glowfilter -f-args="-recurse 2 -glowfact=0.177" -}

which renders all 200 framees and filters the ones from 0..29 just like above. (Filtering is always done right after rendering on a per-frame basis).

Now, let's say you have a 4-CPU box and you want to start 3 jobs for every CPU, hence run 12 renderers in parallel. Furthermore, these should run with nice value 15. (You can try out even on a fairly fast single-CPU box.)

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=frame-%04d.pov -ld-r-quiet -ld-njobs=12 -ld-r-nice=15

Also, have a look at all the nice output. Running RendView in an XTerm and writing this docu at the same time when executing the above command on a single-CPU Athlon-1.4 GHz, I get the following output after the last frame:

Exiting at (local): Fri Mar 28 2003, 13:14:57.024 CET
Elapsed since start:  00:02:15.370
Load control: [disabled]; current load: 10.97
Last successfully done frames: 196 197 198 199 200
Overall CPU stats:
  RendView:      0.17% CPU  (user: 00:00:00.080; sys: 00:00:00.150)
  Local jobs:   96.31% CPU  (user: 00:02:09.280; sys: 00:00:01.100)
  Together:     96.48% CPU  (user: 00:02:09.360; sys: 00:00:01.250)

But who has a 4-CPU-box? For many people, rendering on 4 boxes (or more) is more likely...

LDR Client and server

Starting the LDR clients

Ready to perform work: max-failed-in-seq=3
  Execution timeout: [none]
Current load average: 0.000000
  Load control: [disabled]; current load: 0.00
  Starting at (local): Fri Mar 28 2003, 15:22:45.946 CET
  Cycle timeout: [none]
Okay, waiting for work: njobs=1 (parallel tasks)
  jtype    jmax  nice   timeout  tty
  render:     1   15±        --   no  (quiet)
  filter:     1   15±        --   no
  todo-thresh: low=1, high=6; done-thresh: high=10
  term-kill-delay: 1000 msec

Using the LDR server

Okay, now assume we are using the POVRay frame clock to animate our scene.pov and we want to have the clock run from -2 to 10 for a total of 120 frames. So, we have to pass the following options to POVRay: +KFI0 +KFF119 +KI-2.0 +KF10 Especially, do not forget to pass the number of frames to RendView because it can no longer be auto-detected (you get an error otherwise).
Let's further assume that we want PPM files as output instead of default PNG:

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=scene.pov -ld-r-quiet -opmode=ldrserver -Ld-clients="localhost renderslave 192.168.0.6" -Ld-password=foo -l-r-files="mycolors.inc" -l-r-args+=\"+KFI0 +KFF119 +KI-2.0 +KF10\"" -l-r-fc -l-n=120 -l-oformat=ppm

Especially note that the render input frame pattern was replaced by -l-r-ifpattern=scene.pov and consequently, scene.pov was removed from the -l-r-files. Furthermore, -l-r-fc (frame clock) was added to explicitly tell RendView (the LDR server) to use the frame clock value (this is required).
-l-oformat=ppm changes the render output format to PPM. The rendered output files look like scene-0000000.ppm, scene-0000001.ppm, etc. (To get e.g. s-000.ppm, etc, you can use -l-r-ofpattern="s-%03d", the extension .ppm is added automatically.)

Let's do the same as above but assume we want render scene.ini which contains all the +Kxy options and (important) the +Iscene.pov input file spec. We can do that simply by replacing scene.pov by scene.ini and adding scene.pov to the additional files (of course, the additional +Kxy args are no longer needed):

rendview -rdfile=renderers.par -fdfile=filters.par -l-rd=povray3.5 -l-r-ifpattern=scene.ini -ld-r-quiet -opmode=ldrserver -Ld-clients="localhost renderslave 192.168.0.6" -Ld-password=foo -l-r-files="mycolors.inc scene.pov" -l-r-fc -l-n=120 -l-oformat=ppm

Once you want to kill the LDR clients because they are no longer needed, simply send them a SIGTERM or a SIGINT (normally pressing ^C in the terminal).

Finally, Enjoy RendView...
And support me improving it.