LWStripe 3.0 is a tool designed to allow the user to divide the rendering of single frames across multiple processors or machines. It is designed specifically for use with LightWave 5.0 or higher on the Intel platform. It will automatically adjust to work with either LightWave 5.x or LightWave 6.x scene filesAs a standalone program it can run under either Win 95/98, WinNT 4.0 or Win 2000.
It works by formatting the chosen scenefile into one scene file per stripe. These can then be run on separate machines or processors using ScreamerNet. After all stripes are rendered they can be composited in the paint program of your choice to produce your final image.
For anyone using LightWave to produce images in print resolutions the advantages should be obvious. Version 1.0 and the beta version 2.0 have been in use for about a year by a very successful LightWave artist in Europe producing large poster size renderings. Apart from the obvious advantage of allowing you to cut render time for large single frames by dividing the work over multiple CPUs, it also has the advantage of allowing you to save much of your image in the case of a crash. Many times long complicated renders can crash losing you all of that time. With LWStripe all you need to do is re-render the offending stripe.
Getting Started
After running LWStripe you will see the following screen:
The interface should be fairly intuitive. You select the scene file using the file requester windows on the left side of the window.
The Number of Segments is how many "stripes" you want LWStripe to format your scene file into. This can be up to 99.
The Overlap is the number of pixels of overlap you wish between your stripes. The purpose of this is that some plugins cause some rendering anomalies along the bottom edge the stripes (interior stripes only not the bottom one). This will allow you to specify a certain number of "rows" of pixels that will overlap between the bottom of one stripe and the top of the stripe below it.
After you have set these two fields (or stayed with the default values) you simply click on Stripe It! and your scene file will be striped.
The resulting scenefiles will be saved in the same folder and named in the following format:
Filename_s1.lws, Filename_s2.lws, Filename_s3.lws … etc.
Your rendered image will be saved in the directory you specified in Layout in the following format:
Imagename_s1_ , Imagename_s2_ , Imagename_s3_ … etc.
Finishing up
All that is left is to load the individual stripe images into your favorite paint or compositing software and composite them into a single image.