V I R T U A L I G H T

V I R T U A L I G H T

Microsoft Windows® installation notes

October 7, 2002

Installation

Remove (or move it somewhere else) any older version of VIRTUALIGHT installed on your machine before installing the new version.
Unpack the VIRTUALIGHT distribution : create a directory into which VIRTUALIGHT will be installed, and extract the contents of the distribution ZIP file into it (example: C:\VirtuaLight). This name must not have any space character.
Set the VIRTUALIGHT environment variable and path:

Under Windows NT / 2000

Right click over the "My Computer" icon and select "Properties".
Go to the "Advanced" tab and click the "Environment variables" button.
Add the Bin directory of where you installed VIRTUALIGHT to your PATH variable.

Example :

Variable: PATH

Values: ……;C:\VIRTUALIGHT\BIN;

Add the VLIGHT_ROOT variable and set it to where you installed the package.

Example:

Variable: VLIGHT_ROOT

Values: C:\VIRTUALIGHT

If you had set these values during a previous installation of VIRTUALIGHT, make sure that any references to the old values are removed, except if you installed the new version in the same place.

Under Windows 98 / ME

Edit C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT in order to set the VLIGHT_ROOT environment variable, and to update your PATH to include the Bin directory from the package.

For example, the following could be added to the bottom of AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\VIRTUALIGHT\BIN

set VLIGHT_ROOT=C:\VIRTUALIGHT

If you had set these values during a previous installation of VIRTUALIGHT, make sure that any references to the old values are removed, except if you installed the new version in the same place.

VirtuaLight doesn't work properly under Windows 95.

VirtuaLight is now installed on your system. Reboot your computer.

The "VirtuaLight Interface" and "User Manual" PDF files (Acrobat documents in directory \DOC) are the two official documents to read in order to know almost everything about VirtuaLight. It you don’t have any Acrobat reader, Adobe makes it available for free at:http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Issues specific to the Win32 VLight release

GLUT: In OpenGL rendering mode, the program uses the GLUT 3.7.5 API. The dynamic library GLUT32.DLL is included in the \BIN directory. So, in order to avoid possible conflicts with older releases, any other version of this library present on your system should be removed.

About multi-processor machines: VLight is not yet a multi-thread program. It means that even if your machine has two or more CPUs, a same session of the renderer will only use one. However, it is possible to run a VLight console application for each CPU. You just have to open as many command prompt windows as there are CPUs in the computer, and to render a different scene (or a different part of the same scene) in each window. This is particularly useful with scenes representing an animation sequence. For instance, on a dual-processor machine, each CPU can take care of each half of the sequence (if the total animation length is 250 frames, CPU1 renders frames 0 to 124 and CPU2 renders frames 125 to 249). If this sequence takes 40 minutes to render completely on a mono-processor computer, it will only take 20 minutes using this technique on a dual-processor machine.