[vtkusers] parallel rendering

[Miguel Angel Martin Fernandez]

Hello vtkusers!

I am trying to make a parallel version of ray-casting, using MPI. The
approach i've been thinking of is to divide the image into rows of pixels,
so that each machine must render only a subset of the rows. The only place
i've found where i can do this is in vtkRayCaster, because there is a loop
that traverses the whole image, casting rays from each pixel. Is this a
reasonable approach?

However, an instance of vtkRayCaster is automatically generated by
vtkRenderer, and so i haven't been able to write a different class, that
implements a parallel version of vtkRayCaster. Instead, i think i must
change vtkRayCaster itself. Is this right?

Finally, if i want to run this on a cluster, i believe that
vtkRenderWindow and vtkRenderWindowInteractor only make sense on one of
the processes (the one that will put it all together). However, i can't
find the way to make the rest of the processes execute their
pipelines... does it make sense to write 
                      
                          renderer->Render();

without having a renderWindow associated with the renderer?? 

My idea was to have MPI encapsulated in vtkRayCaster so that, once a
process computes its part of the image, it sends it to process "zero". 

Any ideas will be welcome...

	Thank you very much in advance!



-- 
            ________________________________________________________
  _________(_                                                      _)_________
  \········(_   Miguel Ángel Martín Fernández                      _)········/
   \·······(_   ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid   _)·······/
    \······(_   Campus Miguel Delibes, Camino del Cementerio, s/n  _)······/
     )·····(_   e-mail: miguel at atenea.tel.uva.es                   _)·····(
    /······(_   Tfno: +34-983-423000 Ext. 25548                    _)······\
   /·······(________________________________________________________)·······\
  /__________)                                                 (_____________\