There are a number of ways to view your image after it is rendered. You can use the following standalone utilities:
The imgshow standalone displays an image on the screen. The imgshow standalone can display any file format for which there is a dynamic link library (DLL on Windows systems).
The Setup program installs these DSOs or DLLs to <install directory>/Application/bin/sil. When you type imgshow, the usage message lists the supported file formats.
To run imgshow, you must set the environment variable SI_IMAGE_PATH to point to the <install directory>/Application/bin/sil directory.
<image file> is the name of the file you want to show. For example, to see the image file called toto.1.pic at the size of 200 pixels high and 250 pixels wide, you would type:
imgshow toto.1 -height 200 -width 250imgshow automatically detects supported image file formats, so input files do not require an extension (such as .pic) to identify their format. However, if the file on disk has an extension, you should specify it.
For example, type the following to see the file on disk called toto.1.pic:
imgshow toto.1.picThe sequence standalone displays a sequence of frames and runs user-defined shell scripts. If there are C-shell scripts with specific names in the current working directory, the sequence executes the scripts as follows:
To stop displaying a sequence, press all three mouse buttons at the same time.
The si3d_flipbook standalone displays image sequences and field-rendered image sequences at the rate you specify. If the program cannot display the frames at that rate, it skips frames. If the image is bigger than the screen, it automatically reduces the image.
You can also perform these tasks using the Autodesk Softimage flipbook (flip.exe) by choosing Playback Flipbook from the Playback panel beneath the timeline in the Softimage interface. See Previewing Animation in a Flipbook [Animation] for more information.
si3d_flipbook <sequence> <first>[ <last> [ <step> [<rate> ]]][-R <factor>][-M] [-F|-E|-O] [-i] [v]
This example shows the jumbo.pic image sequence from frames 1 to 150 with a step of 1 (1 150 1) at 24 frames per second.
si3d_flipbook jumbo 1 150 1 24For field-rendered image sequences, you can view the odd-field, even-field, or both dominated images. For example, to view the even-field image, type:
si3d_flipbook <output> -EOnce the first frame is displayed:
Right-click to flip forward. The sequence loops when it reaches the last frame.
To adjust the frame rate interactively, middle-click and drag the mouse to the right to flip forward and drag to the left to flip backward. The display rate corresponds to the speed at which you drag the mouse.
To set the zoom factor interactively, middle-click to pause then press any key from 1 to 9.
To exit, click two or more mouse buttons at once or press Esc.
Images loaded in a flipbook are not compressed, so they take up the full amount of memory for each pixel regardless of their size on the disk. The physical size of the image in pixels and the amount of RAM available determine how many images you can play back at the specified frame rate without skipping frames. For the flipbook to work efficiently, the images must fit into RAM; virtual memory is too slow for an acceptable playback speed.
The space taken by the images should not exceed the amount of free main memory. If it does, the computer starts swapping memory to disk and the display is slowed down considerably.
Use the following formula to calculate the number of bytes needed to load the images (4 refers to the four channels of an RGBA image):
4 ° (height of frame) ° (width of frame) ° (number of frames)
For example, to calculate the memory required for a 256 ° 256 image, the equation 256 ° 256 ° 4 gives you 262 144 bytes, or 256 kilobytes, so 100 images would require at least 25.6 megabytes of RAM to display without disk swapping.
In this case, you would actually require more memory because the operating system takes up about 5 megabytes of memory. A system with 16 megabytes of main memory can flip approximately 100 frames of 165 ° 165 resolution images.
For displays of longer animations, flipbook can use a step frame. If every other frame was rendered using a step value of 2 and a display rate of 15 frames per second, you would have an accurate representation of the timing of the motion.
The imf_disp standalone displays image files, including memory-map texture images created by imf_copy. The imf_disp standalone displays all formats supported by the mental ray rendering software (except the SOFTIMAGE Zpic format).
This example displays the toto.pic image on screen:
imf_disp totoimf_disp automatically detects supported image file formats, so files do not require an extension (such as .pic) to identify their format.
imf_disp also supports image piping. Normally, mental ray prints connection information into the output image file that lets programs like imf_disp connect and display pictures while being rendered. If the -imgpipe option is used when rendering from the command line, the relevant information is printed to the given file descriptor instead:
ray2 -imgpipe 1 scene.mi | imf_dispExcept where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License