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Subsections

- Writing RIB with libribout
- Parsing Shader Arguments
- iv - an Image Viewer
  - Invoking iv from the command line
  - iv hot keys and mouse commands
- Simple Image Compositing with composite
- Setting default options and attributes
- farm: Poor Man's Render Farm
  - How to use farm
  - What farm does
  - Important farm restrictions

#
Miscellaneous Tools

# Writing RIB with libribout You may wish to write a C or C++ program which makes calls to the procedural interface, resulting in the output of RIB. The resulting RIB may be piped directly to another process (such as a previewer), or redirected to a file for later rendering. The library `libribout.a` (or `libribout.lib` on Windows) does this. This library provides a `C' language binding for the RenderMan Procedural Interface. The `libribout` library has all its public routines use the C language binding, but its implementation contains C++ code, so it is important to either use a C++ compiler to link with it, or else to manually include the standard C++ libraries. If your program is written in C++, you can link `libribout` in the usual way. The following example shows how to link with this library on a typical Unix machine:
            CC myprog.c -o myprog -lribout -lm
If your program is written in ordinary C, then you could compile with C, then link with C++:
            cc -c myprog.c
            CC myprog.o -o myprog -lribout -lm
On an SGI, it's apparently important to include `-lC` on the linkage line, to ensure that the C++ standard library is linked properly. In any case, this will result in an executable, `myprog`, which outputs RIB requests to standard output. This may be redirected to a specific RIB file as follows:
            myprog > myfile.rib
Remember that the `RiBegin` statement usually only takes the argument `RI_NULL`:
            RiBegin (RI_NULL);
The default of sending RIB to stdout can be overridden by providing a filename to the RiBegin statement in your program. For example, suppose your program contains the following statement instead:
            RiBegin ("myfile.rib");
In this case, the RIB requests corresponding to the Ri procedure calls will be sent to the file `"myfile.rib"` rather than to standard output. In addition, if the filename you specify starts with the ``|`' character, the library will open a pipe to the program specified after the ``|`' symbol. For example, `RiBegin ("|rgl");` will cause the RIB you produce to be piped directly to a running rgl process without creating an intermediate RIB file. Remember to tell the C compiler where the `ri.h` and `libribout.a` files are, or it won't be able to find them. # Parsing Shader Arguments Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan implementation provides a linkable library which allows a developer to read a compiled shader file (.slo) to determine what type of shader it is and what parameter names and defaults belong to that shader. Since Pixar's .slo format is different from BMRT's .slc format, similar functionality is provided to parse the .slc files. The C language header file for these is slc.h. This file should be fairly self-documenting, and certainly anybody with experience using Pixar's libsloargs.a library ought to have an easy time using it. These routines are all contained in `libribout.a`, so you should link your software against `libribout.a` if you are outputting RIB or parsing shader arguments or both. However, if you want to parse BMRT shader arguments but use some other RIB client library (such as PRMan's `librib.a`), then there is an additional library you can use, `libslcargs.a`, which contains only the routines for .slc file parsing, but none of the symbols which are also expected to be in a RIB client library. # iv - an Image Viewer Once you render images, you need to view them. There are dozens, or possibly hundreds, of programs that can display your ordinary TIFF images that BMRT produces. But probably none of them can display the tiled TIFF images used for textures, environment maps, and shadow maps. Nor can most of them handle 16-bit and floating point images. And even for ordinary images, many image viewers are lacking in certain features that you may find handy. So we have provided iv, the Image Viewer tool. ## Invoking iv from the command line Invoking iv is very simple: `iv` [options] file1 ... filen Any number of files may be specified on the command line. Several options may also be specified before the files are listed: -g gamma Sets the gamma correction for subsequent images. The `gamma` parameter is a floating point number, which default to 1.0. Without the `-g` option, the gamma correction will be taken from the `$GAMMA` environment variable. If no such environment variable exists, no gamma correction will be performed. Note that you can have multiple `-g` options on the command line, interspersed with image file names (this lets you correct different images with different gamma values). -info When this flag is used, the name and resolution of each file will be printed to `stdout`. -sb Normally, you can use the middle mouse button to ``drag'' the image around if the image resolution is greater than your display window. If you use the `-sb` command line option, iv will also display scroll bars at the edge of the window. ## iv hot keys and mouse commands Once you are running iv and viewing images, there are several keyboard and mouse commands that you may find useful: PgUp PgDn The `PgUp` and `PgDn` keys cycle you to the previous and next images in the list of images. ENTER The `ENTER` key will reload the current image from disk. r g b a c The `r`, `g`, `b`, and `a` keys will cause iv to display just the red, green, blue, or alpha channels of images. The `c` key will display full color again. f The `f` key reframes the window. That is, it will readjust the size of the display window to match the resolution of the currently viewed image. p The `p` key opens a pixel view window that shows you a zoomed view of the pixels surrounding the mouse position, and numeric values for the pixel under the cursor. Hitting `ESC` with the cursor in the pixel view window will close the pixel view window (but not the main window). q The `q` key causes iv to close its windows and exit. s The `s` invokes pixel select mode. In this mode, a single pixel is selected for the pixel view window. The selected pixel no longer follows the mouse cursor, but can be moved with the four arrow keys. Hitting `s` again returns to the usual mouse cursor. Left-click Clicking the left mouse button inside the image window zooms in (makes the pixels bigger on screen). Right-click Clicking the right mouse button inside the image window zooms out (makes the pixels smaller on screen). Middle-drag Moving the mouse with the middle button held down will drag the image around the window, if the image resolution is greater than the window size. # Simple Image Compositing with composite BMRT includes a program to perform elementary image compositing operations. If you render your images with alpha channels (i.e. `"rgba"`), then coverage information will be stored with every pixel in the image. For the purposes of composite, RGB images without alpha channels will be assumed to have an alpha of 1.0 at every pixel. composite may be run as follows: composite file1 over file2 -o output composite file1 in file2 -o output composite file1 out file2 -o output composite file1 atop file2 -o output composite file1 xor file2 -o output Composite images file1 and file2 using one of the standard image compositing operators described in (Porter & Duff, "Digital Image Compositing", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '84, pp. 253-259), storing the composited image in file output. composite file1 plus file2 -o output composite file1 minus file2 -o output Add or subtract two files, storing the results in file output. Pixels are clamped to [0,maxval], where maxval==255 for 8 bit images, maxval==65535 for 16 bit images. composite file1 scale float -o output composite file1 dissolve float -o output composite file1 opaque float -o output These three unary operators take a floating point number, rather than a filename, as their second operand. They all scale the channels of the image, but in slightly different ways. The `scale` operator multiples the RGB channels, but leaves the alpha alone - i.e. it can brighten or darken an image without changing its transparency. The `dissolve` operator scales the alpha along with the RGB. Finally, the `opaque` operator will scale only the alpha channel. Hint for beginners: you probably want `over`. # Setting default options and attributes Remember that both of BMRT's renderers (rendrib and rgl) read from a file called `.rendribrc` both in the local directory where it is run, and also in your home directory. This file can be plain RIB, which means that if you want to set any defaults (default resolution, shader search path, texture cache size, etc.) you can just put the Option or Attribute lines in this file in your home directory. # farm: Poor Man's Render Farm Many people ask how they can divide rendering of a single frame among several processors or machines. The simple Perl script farm accomplishes this task, in a relatively rudimentary way. ## How to use farm Set the environment variable `BMRT_FARM` to be a blank-separated list of the names of machines which can be used as render servers. Machines with multiple processors should be listed multiple times. For example, if you have a machine named "fred" with two processors, and one named "wilma" with one processor, then run: `setenv BMRT_FARM "fred fred wilma"` if you use `csh`. If you use `sh`, try: `export BMRT_FARM="fred fred wilma"` Make sure that rendrib is in the default path of each remote machine, and that mkmosaic is in the path on the local machine. Run farm: `farm myfile.rib` ## What farm does First, farm will look at your RIB file to figure out the resolution and the name of the TIFF file that it will render. It will choose an appropriate number of subwindows to render. One by one, it will send the frame to machines on your `BMRT_FARM` list, using the `-crop` and `-of` flags to make rendrib render particular crop windows. Machines whose load averages are too high will automatically refuse the frames. When farm sees that all the subsections are finished (each will leave a little file indicating that it's done), it will assemble all the pieces using the mkmosaic program, and clean up all the cruft files. ## Important farm restrictions Because farm relies on rsh, you can only use it on UNIX (or UNIX-like) operating systems. You can't use farm to render to the display (the -d flag). It must be rendering to a TIFF file. Don't try using any other rendrib command line flags. Request all image options (like radiosity options) in the RIB file with Option and Attribute statements. Hitting Control-C to interrupt farm will kill only farm, but will leave the individual crop windows rendering on the remote machines. Beware.

Next: Using BMRT as a Up: Blue Moon Rendering Tools Previous: Shaders and Textures Contents