Tiling in a cluster setting

[vijaykiran]

Hello,

I looked at setting up a cluster for multiple walls with one instance of Vizard running on each wall here (http://www.worldviz.com/vizhelp/Configuring_your_cluster.htm). I was wondering what needs to be done for running multiple instances of Vizard tiled together on a single wall.

I was wondering if there is any documentation on doing this.

Each of our projectors have four video inputs, so four instances of Vizard will need to be tiled and stitched together. Any assistance would be greatly helpful.

Thanks,
Vijay.

[farshizzo]

Have a look at the documentation for the vizcave module (http://www.worldviz.com/vizhelp/Vizcave.htm). The cave.addWall command accepts a mask parameter that controls which computer in the cluster will render that wall. So split up your physical wall into 4 quadrants and create a virtual wall for each quadrant.

[dtidrow]

Have a look at the documentation for the vizcave module (http://www.worldviz.com/vizhelp/Vizcave.htm). The cave.addWall command accepts a mask parameter that controls which computer in the cluster will render that wall. So split up your physical wall into 4 quadrants and create a virtual wall for each quadrant.

Can you create a CAVE with multiple projectors per wall? For example, we're looking into creating a CAVE with three walls and a floor, each surface consisting of four projectors driven by at least two computers (ideally one-to-one). How would you set this up in Vizard? Could you also overlap the projectors so that they can edge-blend?

[farshizzo]

Yes, this should be possible with the vizcave module. A vizcave.Wall object does not necessarily have to represent an actual physical wall. It simply represents the physical rectangular surface that the computer is responsible for rendering to.

The vizcave module does not perform edge-blending. This is usually left to the hardware to accomplish. However, you can specify overlapping dimensions for the wall objects.

[dtidrow]

Yes, this should be possible with the vizcave module. A vizcave.Wall object does not necessarily have to represent an actual physical wall. It simply represents the physical rectangular surface that the computer is responsible for rendering to.

The vizcave module does not perform edge-blending. This is usually left to the hardware to accomplish. However, you can specify overlapping dimensions for the wall objects.

Okay, that's pretty much what I thought. So is there any upper limit to the number of PC's you can have in a cluster? Is there a degredadion in performance as you add more PC's to the cluster? Would it be beneficial to have a master computer only control the slaves, and have the slaves do all the rendering?

[farshizzo]

Currently, you can have a maximum of 32 computers in a cluster.

Having more computers means more network traffic, so there might be a small performance hit in that regard.

Having the clients perform all the rendering is perfectly fine. Simply add the following code to your script to prevent the master from rendering:viz.cluster.pushMask(viz.MASTER)
viz.MainWindow.visible(0)
viz.cluster.popMask()