[Paraview] building paraview with vtkManta [Re: ParaView Digest, Vol 123, Issue 33]

[Bill Sherman]

Dave,

+1 on the Manta stuff for me.  I'll give it a try myself in August once
I get my current Vis project done.

Rich,

Something else you might consider (as am I), instead of Blender/POVray
is RenderMan -- Pixar is making it freely available for non commercial
use in the next month or so (hopefully at SIGGRAPH), and I anticipate
RenderMan will be able to handle big rendering jobs.

I've seen that there is a vtk module for outputting RenderMan RiB files,
which is a hopeful sign, though I'd suspect that there's been some
atrophy in that, so who knows how easy it will be to make it work.

I plan to put RenderMan on our Cray ASAP once the release happens.

	Bill


> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 16:25:04 +0000
> From: "Cook, Rich"<cook47 at llnl.gov>
> To: David E DeMarle<dave.demarle at kitware.com>
> Cc: "paraview at paraview.org"<paraview at paraview.org>
> Subject: Re: [Paraview] building paraview with vtkManta
> Message-ID:<7AC6E2E2-970C-4DAB-9ADE-0992765A6BA6 at llnl.gov>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Thanks
> What kind of experience can I expect?  I couldn?t find a description, tutorial or other presentation on the subject other than the page I stumbled across.
> I?m hoping this will scale better than e.g blender does, where I?m hitting size limitations at disappointing scales.  I?m dusting off my old POVray stuff and I recall being seriously limited there as well in terms of size and speed but haven?t gotten it working again yet to be able to tell if it?s the same now as it was.
> I?d love to see your build script, thanks.
> ? Rich
>
> On Jul 17, 2014, at 6:55 AM, David E DeMarle<dave.demarle at kitware.com<mailto:dave.demarle at kitware.com>>  wrote:
>
> Hey Rich,
>
> I just ran across mention of vtkManta support in paraview.
>
> Wow, 2010? You've got some catching up to do. :)
>
> It still compiles, runs and passes high level tests tests. The nightly linux binaries have it if you want to try it out quickly.
>
> To compile it you need to:
> * compile manta (specifically r2439)
> * configure paraview with PARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_MantaView ON and MANTA_BUILD variable pointed to your manta build tree.
>
> Let me know if you need the exact syntax for unattended builds and I'll send you a shell script.
>
> How solid is this?
>
> I am aware of a couple of bugs that have crept in while this has been in cold storage (i.e. no project since the initial LANL push to pick up development on it).
> * Manta (r2439 specifically) needs patches for OSX 10.8+ and MSVC.
> * View level options are not exposed in the GUI (very recent regression)
> * off by one bug in point associated color mapping (probably old)
>
> We did get to the "future work" item from that article about integrating manta at the Renderer level so that OpenGL and Manta can coexist and it can be used in standalone builds.
>
> TACC is working on something that will address the limitation that secondary rays don't work in HPC contexts.
>
> Feel free to send me or the list emails for help getting it running.
>
> cheers,
>
> David E DeMarle
> Kitware, Inc.
> R&D Engineer
> 21 Corporate Drive
> Clifton Park, NY 12065-8662
> Phone: 518-881-4909
>