Rayfront User Manual

System Requirements

Supported Plattforms

Rayfront is designed to run on allmost any unix system or Microsoft Windows systems of the NT family. Rayfront 1.0 includes binaries for the following platforms:

We have reports that Rayfront also works with consumer versions of Windows (Windows98, WindowsME), although we are not able to actively support those. Please note that some versions of Windows98 have bugs that prevent Rayfront from working correctly (affecting the popen() system function, among other things). If you suspect this to be the case for your system, it may help to upgrade to the latest system software release and to install all available service packs.

Hardware Requirements

We recommend to use at least a Pentium class computer with 300 MHz or faster (or a comparable CPU for unix systems). You may manage to start the program with 32 MB of RAM, but you might not be able to run any useful simulations with less than 64 MB. If you want to run some other software like Autocad/Intellicad at the same time, then you probably need at least 128 MB. As a general rule, more RAM is always better for your system.

Disk Space for Installation

The basic installation with executables for one platform takes up to 25 MB of disk space. Executables for each additional platform will require up to 15 MB of storage on top of that.

Disk Space for Simulations

When running simulations, the disk space required for the project data will vary strongly with scene complexity. There are several different components of a simulation that will require disk space:

• Small projects will take a few MBs, while elaborate models may produce 30 MB or more of scene input data alone.

• Typical sizes for ambient files range between 5 and 20 MB, but up to 80 MB and more are easily possible.

• Creating secondary sources when preprocessing objects with mkillum(1) may also produce data files of substantial size. The size of the output images varies with their pixel resolution.

• An image of 1024x683 pixels typically takes around 8 MB. Take into account that the intermediate image calculated for simulations of medium or high quality will need about 4 resp. 9 times the space of the final version due to oversampling.

Navigation: