SGI 3D Studio Renderer Product Specification 1) Description of Differences from PC 3D Studio Renderer Due to the multitasking nature of IRIX, the requirements for a renderer user interface need more flexibility than is proved by the PC version. Whereas the PC renderer is the only interactive process running on the machine, an IRIX renderer will be one of many processes, and therefore needs the ability to disassociate itself from the user's terminal. The renderer will therefore run as a daemon, and the user interface will be a seperate process (hereafter referred to as the "front-end") which can connect and disconnect from the renderer process as the user desires. Communication between the processes will be through the RPC ("Remote Procedure Call") mechanism. One added benefit of this mechanism is that the monitor process can be run on a different machine from the renderer. The user interface itself is described in paragraph (2) below. [Because the renderer may run in the background while the primary user of a workstation is using the machine for other tasks, there will be an option to change the priority of the renderer at any time. For instance, the user may wish to lower the renderer's priority during the day, and then restore the original priority at night. This will allow the user improved response during working hours. We should evaluate the impact of this proposal to see if the effect is noticeable, and if there is time to implement it.] Log entries written by the SGI renderer will necessarily terminate lines with both a Carriage Return and a Line Feed, in order to maintain compatibility with the Master running on a PC. While this is a similarity to the PC version, rather than a difference, it is different from standard behavior of an SGI application; the code will be modified to explicitly support this requirement. Some restrictions on filenames will exist, in order to maintain compatibility with the PC version. These restrictions are enumerated in paragraph (3) below. 2) Screen Display Description The GUI ("graphical user interface") of the front will be a single motif dialog with a layout similar to the dialog which shows on the PC version during rendering. The visuals will differ slightly due the the use of Motif for the labels and buttons. There will also be a sparse menu bar at the top of the dialog, to allow the user some level of interactivity. The most noticeable difference in appearence from the PC version is that the main program (e.g. the Keyframer) will not be visible behind the renderer dialog. 3) 3dsnet.set File The 3dsnet.set file shall be nearly identical to the PC version. Carriage Returns will not be present at the end of lines. Directory and file names will be limited to eight characters plus a three character extension, in order to maintain compatibility with the PC. All filenames *must* be lower-case. Unix-style pathnames shall be used. The name of the file will be "3dsnet.set". 4) 3ds.set File and IPAS Directory Other than pathname restrictions listed in (3) above, and the removal of line-ending carriage-return characters, the major difference between the PC and SGI versions of the 3ds.net file will the removal of parameters with no meaning to the slave renderer. For example, parameters for video driver, the 3D Editor and the Keyframer will be removed. The name of the file will be "3ds.set". 5) Installation Procedure The 3D Studio renderer will be installed via the command-line tool "inst" or the new graphical equivalent "swmgr". More details on "inst" and "swmgr" are available on-line by reading the man pages (i.e. type "man inst" or "man swmgr" at a shell prompt). 6) System Dependencies and Requirements The renderer will require IRIX 5.2 (or greater) and will run on any SGI workstation. A minimum of 32MB RAM will be required, and 64MB or more (depending on the size of the project) are recommended. A minimum of 35-40MB of disk space will be required. Two file-sharing methods have been tested to date: Sun's PC-NFS version 5.0, and Novell's LAN Workplace 4.2 with NFS Client. LAN Workplace must be run in PC-NFS compatibility mode. In order for file-locking to work between the PC and the SGI, a special version of lockd must be run on the server, which uses unix-style locks to back up the PC-NFS SHARE requests. This version of lockd will be made available as a patch to IRIX 5.2 and IRIX 5.3, and will (hopefully) appear in IRIX 5.4 and later. Unfortunately this means that the file server must be an SGI, unless another server vendor provides similar functionality in lockd. Other network solutions, including Chameleon NFS, have yet to be tested.