Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

00 Feb 2001

Mac3D News: More on Radiance for Mac OS X

Architosh recently published a report on a Japanese user who has compiled the advanced Unix rendering software, Radiance, on Mac OS X. Kota Bando wrote in to us regarding a Japanese language Web page with the compile instructions. A couple of readers who can read Japanese wrote in to talk more about it:

I've spent a fair bit of time translating the Japanese web page that describes Radiance running on MacOS X, and have a fair understanding of what Mr. Tabata's hack is about. -- Charles Eicher

Charles goes on to describe more details of Mr. Tabata's work.

He describes a way to modify compiler settings to run Radiance solely from the command line. It appears that the mods [modifications] just remove the X11 interface. The screen shot shows Radiance being run from the command line with graphics output to a file, and the file is displayed in MacOS X in a separate app. -- Charles

That "separate app" Charles is talking about is called Grab and is a default Mac OS X application which enables you to "grab" screens and windows in OS X, converting them instantly into PDF files.

The article talks briefly about X Windows interface to Radiance, I've never had access to a machine that ran Radiance so I don't know what he means but I'm dying to try it. The mods don't seem too difficult, they are based on a compiler configuration of Radiance for the old Tenon MachTen Unix system, so they were close to PPC code already. Now we just need to get a finalized X Windows in Aqua client, and we can run more software like Radiance in its full glory. -- Charles

Reader Austin Sloat also wrote in about his look-over of the Radiance on OS X page. He had this to say:

Unfortunately it looks like they compiled without X11 support... I downloaded the xtools trial from tenon, installed it and tried to do a compile for radiance. About 3/4 of the code compiled. I haven't analyzed the compile log much yet. I made a few modifications to the makefile. -- Austin Sloat

The XTen tools from Tenon are a full featured X11R6 server and client which allow you to run Xwindows applications from Unix workstations remotely from your Mac. And you can also run them locally. Sloat continues:

It would be nice if we could publish a script that would work for both an X11 install or no-X install. The problem with the no-X install is that you have to change some of the code manually (or apply diffs) to have a successful compile-- fairly easy for Unix folk but a bit of a pain for mac types. The darwin folks are working on a X server that will run alongside of Aqua like xtools, but without the cost. -- Austin

It would be great to publish ALL materials necessary to successfully compile Radiance on Mac OS X. So we are appreciative of those folks who have written in with their attempts and lessons. Hopefully we can get Radiance fully up on Mac OS X soon and be able to publish the whole installation process for Mac types who don't have experience with Unix at all.

Valuable Experiences for Traditional Mac Users

This process of working with Radiance, essentially free Unix software, for Mac OS X is a very valuable experience for traditional Mac users, as more and more Mac users will likely venture into making Unix software work under OS X. Getting familiar with this type of process is going to be one of the most important new skills for Mac users. We will continue to report on the Radiance on Mac OS X efforts as they develop.

Special thanks for Charles and Austin.

For more information about running Xtools in Mac OS X go to the Tenon Xtools page.