Ship Auditions

Yesterday I rewired some of the path tracer's global memory usage so that it can handle scene updates without having to recompile/restart.  This means that I can change the Welder program, save it, and have the tracer recompile the scene and start rendering without ever having to restart it!  Today, I added some small features: the ability to convert the current render into LDR and save it, as well as the ability to pass global environment variables to a Welder program on startup.

These all seem like moderately dumb/easy things.  But what do you get when you couple them all together?  Automated ship production!  I can program the tracer to automatically re-execute the Welder program after a certain amount of render time, causing the scene to rebuild.  But, using the environment variables, I can increment a seed value so that the program doesn't produce the same result.  Finally, I can save the previous render to a file.  The tracer can then recompile the scene data and start rendering the new scene!

This means that I can automate the rendering of "previews" of many ships, making the task of finding the right seed value easier. Tonight I set the program to give each ship a 1-minute rendertime.  It blazed through about 45 ships before I decided that I needed to go to bed (I can hear the birds again...).

Here are some of my favorites from the night:

Man, this is a cool way to explore the possibilities!  I'm also impressed with these one-minute renders...definitely not bad quality for sixty seconds!  Oh MLT...how I love you.