Technical Report number 8 1991.

School of Computing - Technical Reports

Marriott, A..(1991)
Farming Raytrace Animation at Curtin.
Curtin University of Technology Technical Report number 8 1991.

Abstract

This document is one of a series of technical reports describing the Computer Animation Negus (CAN) Raytrace System.
The image generation of the Raytrace System is described in Image Generation using the Computer Animation Negus Raytracing System by Marriott and Dench.
The recording of the animation is described in Recording Animation at Curtin by Marriott.

Raytracing is very computationally expensive and the classical solution is to employ a parallel architecture to break the task into n parts. This can mean that:
the frames of an animated piece can be farmed out to and that groups of scanlines can be rendered on different processors.

With lean overheads, the speed improvement can be close to n for n processors. The CAN raytrace system supports distributed network computation for multiple frame animation and also for single frames. The frame distribution is supported by a utility called "farmr" and the "-m" switch of the CAN raytracer enables intra-frame distribution. .sp 1 This document details how "farmr" and the "-m" switch are used to reduce the time taken for a raytraced image. It also gives examples of techniques that can be used to produce complex animation with minimal effort.

Keywords: animation farming Computer Animation Negus CAN multiprocessor
Number of References: Special
Address:
raytrace@cs.curtin.edu.au or saila@cs.curtin.edu.au
Telephone/Fax: +619 351 7675 / +619 351 2819

Document Components

PostScript document

with images (6144286 bytes) with no images (244044 bytes)

Figures

Figure 1.1 (591663 bytes) First Prize Ausgraph 90 Technical Section 1/3.
Figure 1.2 (459079 bytes) Architectural view #1.
Figure 1.3 (527615 bytes) Architectural view #2.
Figure 1.4 (406275 bytes) First Prize Ausgraph 90 Technical Section 2/3.
Figure 1.5 (911481 bytes) First Prize Ausgraph 90 Technical Section 3/3.
Figure 1.10a (1107825 bytes) Scanned, rendered and composited images.
Figure 1.10b (1020067 bytes) Scanned, rendered and composited images.