By James Johnson (Nakia) (205.228.12.37) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 07:16 am:

Greetings,
I just got my Licensed Copy in the mail of LW 7.5. Just wanted to share that.
I will be using it on a Powermac G4 933, Geforce 4MX Dual monitor setup, 1gig RAM, PCI IDE RAID, OS X 10.2. It runs good on this Box (except it seem to render slow). Are there any tips on running LW on Macs that a Mac user should be aware of?
Are they any current issues that will effect a newbie Mac LW user?
One last thing is there any kind of Background rendering or cron job style rendering that can be done with LW, so I could render jobs without having to be logged on the box. I'm kind of used to kicking off background and nightly renders with blender and 3Delight.
Thanks in advance!!

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 08:00 am:

Congratulations on becoming a Lightwaver!

Is that a dual processor machine? If it is, you should increase the number of threads, which is an option in the preferences. It doesn't matter for single processor machines.

Maybe upgrade your OS to 10.2.3, or otherwise wait a few days and 10.2.4 will be out.

Jonathan Baker's Screamernet Controller application may be of interest to you for rendering:
http://www.catalystproductions.cc/screamernet/
He also has released a patch to fix a conflict between Screamernet and OS X 10.2.

Happy Lightwaving!

By James Johnson (Nakia) (205.228.12.37) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 08:23 am:

Thanks for the reply.
Its a good Feeling when you get a good App like LightWave 3D.
Its a single 933 Mhz box. I'm running 10.2.3.
I digging the feel of LW.
I'm going to try out Screamernet.
Hopefully there will be a commandline option to render LW work in the term window or from remote locations. (I'm UNIX head).

By daniel oates (Tapsnap) (66.108.83.71) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 02:37 pm:

Try Lowering the ray recursion limit in the render options to 4 or lower from the default of 16. 16 seems to be much too high as a default setting and it can be set lower with little effect on render quality unless your surfaces are using a lot of reflectives . Speed will increase substantially.

By Greg Reyna (Greg_Reyna) (68.164.57.32) on Monday, February 03, 2003 - 12:58 am:

Daniel, thanks for the "Ray Recursion" tip, I didn't know that one...

James, Did you have any luck with Screamernet? I haven't tried network rendering for about a year and see lots of posts about problems with Jaguar etc. I run multiple partitions with different versions of the OS on them---with LW 7.5 on each one. This has saved me lots of frustration when LW unexpectedly "acts up" under one system or another.

I never did get OS 10.1 to network the three processors on this 800MHz dp G4 machine that's linked to a 400MHz G4 via a router. No problem when running OS 9, but OS X only recognized the two processors in this box, and not the "400". I always suspected it was a "permissions" thing, but couldn't figure it out.

At that time I was wishing that Unix had a program like the Amiga's "SnoopDOS" (you're not an ex Amigan by any chance?) SnoopDOS, or another program like it, could be run before running a problem program and it would feed back every single thing the computer did from that point on, and print it into a file that would be saved even if the machine crashed.

In my opinion,this kind of program should be priority #1 for every OS when the thing is being first developed. It's the ultimate sleuthing tool since it tells you exactly how the computer interprets everything you tell it to do. It seems to me that that must often be the problem when software goes haywire: the user told the machine to do "ABC", but the machine is doing "XYZ", and the user has no way to know that this is happening without SnoopDOS.

I asked Unix heads all over town, got some replies that there may be something like SnoopDOS out there in Unix land, but in the end---nothing.
Do you know if such a thing exists that could be run under OS X?

Greg

By James N. Johnson (Tubal_C) (68.37.118.83) on Monday, February 03, 2003 - 09:54 am:

SnoopDOS I guess is like a crashdump. On solaris boxes you ca get a core dump from a machine that crashed and see everything it was doing when it crashed. Theres a one for Linux folks. Not sure if OS X ha the feature. I beleive FreeBSD does with savecore mostlike Mac OS X does to.