Partrace documentation

These are a pair of simple scripts to split up a povray trace of a single image into slices over DQS under NFS on a UNIX style network (some local info specific to the semiconductor group) and then recombine the resulting TARGA files into a single picture.

The perl code to do the division is called partrace.pl and just fires off a set of povray jobs that trace strips of the image, so if you have a customised binary (perhaps to do isosurfaces) you can still use it. The syntax for using the code is almost identical to command-line povray itself, with the exception of an additional couple of options :

partrace.pl [POVRAY options] +WF wfun1.xyzi +WF wfun2.xyzi +ROW 10 +BIN povray +FT +I file.pov

• +WF - Copy files wfun1.xyzi and wfun2.xyzi to the temporary parallel space during the trace (optional)
• +ROW - Set the number of lines in the individual traces to say 10 (defaults to 20) (optional)
• +BIN - Use a specified binary for povray (optional)
• +FT (or +FC) POVRAY option for tga output (essential)
• +I POVRAY option for input file (essential)

This then produces a set of files called file.\d+.tga, which can be stuck back together with the second script splice.pl. The options for this script are :

splice.pl +F file.tga +N 5 +R

• +F - read in files of the form file.\d+.tga and write file.tga (essential)
• +N - read in say 5 files (in sequential numerical order) (essential)
• +R - remove the tempory files file.\d+.tga (optional)