Autodesk LIGHTSCAPE, Manual

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Rendering 14
220
Lightscape
To ray trace an area:
1.
Click the Ray Trace Area tool or choose
Display | Ray Trace Area.
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 utili-
ties.
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.”
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 radi-
osity 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
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.”