[9fans] povray on p9

[Andrey A Mirtchovski <aam396@mail.usask.ca>]

disclaimer: for those of you not interested in povray or not knowing what
it is, you can stop reading now, or first visit www.povray.org (this is
not an add/spam)

i did something very stupid yesterday -- i actually sat down and started
playing with povray in order to see its capabilities and to learn something
more about it...

what a mistake!

i spent the whole night sunday trying and testing different scenes,
textures, this and that...

not being an artist at all i quickly exhausted my imagination for new scenes
and thought 'let's try and do an animation' -- simply enough, three
one-liners later and some configuration magic and i was sitting there with 180
identical (almost) povray scripts for 180 frames of my first povray
"animation"...

wallclock execution timing showed that 180 frames were calculated for 196
minutes on my K6-2/500 running FreeBSD and i thought --  i have three cpu
servers at school running plan9 and just waiting for somebody to send
them some scenes to render. it could be done very easily (rc script), needs
no excessive bandtwidth (i.e. all the information can reside on a single
fileserver and needs not be local to the cpu doing the rendering, something
that can't easily be done with bioinformatics and gigabyte-size databases)
and will prove to be something very fun to play with!

so, i downloaded the sources and amazingly 15 minutes later povray was
operational -- the port proved very easy and probably everyone on this list
will have no problems doing it.  if anyone wants though i can provide
additional information, or will gzip povray in modified state so
that you just need to type 'make'...

so far i do not experience any trouble running it on plan9 -- the speed is
very good, but that can be due to the fact that i'm running on 450mhz
PIII's instead of a 500 MhZ AMD.. 3-fold speed increase is what i observe.

size of executable is:

--rwxr-xr-x M 649 f2f sys 1904625 Feb 24 23:30 /386/bin/povray


here is a link to one of the standard images that come with povray..
generated with the command (note, i have moved the povray library to
$home/lib, will be fixed later):

cpu%  povray +Ichess2.pov +O$home/chess2.ppm +L$home/lib +W320 +H200 +FP
Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.1g.Plan9.cc
This is an unofficial version compiled by:
FILL IN NAME HERE.........................
The POV-Ray Team(tm) is not responsible for supporting this version.
.
.
.(rendering sounds)
.
.
Time For Trace:    0 hours  6 minutes  13.0 seconds (373 seconds)
Total Time:    0 hours  6 minutes  13.0 seconds (373 seconds)


the generated image is located here:

http://homepage.usask.ca/~aam396/chess2.jpg


So... i hope this isn't gone to waste -- didn't somebody say somewhere that
p9 would make a great rendering farm?


regards: andrey



ps: together with povray came zlib and libpng -- those compiled
effortlessly, so a port of those can be considered done :)