From Manta Wiki

Contents 1 Manta Open Source Interactive Ray Tracer 1.1 Publications 1.2 Conference Courses 2 Source Code 2.1 Checking out 2.2 Building 2.3 Running 2.4 Contributing 3 Questions 3.1 Notes on the repository trunk. 3.2 Screen Shots 3.2.1 Older Branches 3.3 Scenes 3.4 Benchmarks 3.5 Benchmark tools 4 Help

Manta Open Source Interactive Ray Tracer

Welcome to the Manta-wiki. Manta is a highly portable interactive ray tracing environment designed to be used on both workstations and super computers and is distributed under the MIT license. Manta was initially created at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah and is now used by a larger community including academic research groups and companies. This wiki is a resource for both users and developers to describe usage, features, and design of the ray tracer.

For more information about the architecture of Manta please see this page.

Visit the build instructions page and then see instructions for getting started with Manta in a CMake project. License and copyright information.

Additional questions may be sent to the user community mailing list: manta @ sci utah edu. You can subscribe by sending "subscribe manta" to majordomo @ sci utah edu. Mailing list archives back to 2005 are now online!

Publications

J. Bigler, A. Stephens and S. G. Parker Design for Parallel Interactive Ray Tracing Systems Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2006, (to appear) ([http://www.sci.utah.edu/%7Eabe/rt06/manta-rt06.pdf pdf) (tech report)

A. Stephens, S. Boulos, J. Bigler, I. Wald, and S. G. Parker An Application of Scalable Massive Model Interaction using Shared Memory Systems Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2006, (to appear) (pdf)

Conference Courses

D. Kasik, D. Manocha, A. Stephens. B. Bruderlin, P. Slusallek, E. Gobbetti, W. Correa, I. Quilez Tutorial 2: Real-time Interactive Massive Model Visualization. Eurographics 2006. Vienna.

P. Shirley, P. Slusallek, I. Wald, W. Mark, G. Stoll, D. Manocha, A. Stephens  Course 4: State of the Art in Interactive Ray Tracing. SIGGRAPH 2006. Boston. (web site)

Source Code

Checking out

Manta's source code is hosted in a Subversion repository. To check out the code, you must first install Subversion and then checkout the code using:

svn checkout https://code.sci.utah.edu/svn/Manta/trunk Manta

If you have access to the authorized version, use Manta-auth instead.

Building

Manta is built using CMake, a cross platform compilation utility. After installing CMake and having checked out Manta, create a build directory inside of the Manta directory (e.g. build). From there, run:

ccmake ../

which will bring up the CMake configuration tool. Simply configure any options that need to be set (most of the defaults are suitable), and finally ask CCMake to generate Makefiles. From there, you can simply use a standard make command. For more detailed information about the build process, see this page.

Running

After Manta is built, the bin directory will contain a standalone manta executable. On Unix based systems (including Mac OS X), if you have X running you can simply run bin/manta from inside your build directory and get a nice red sphere on a checkerboard.

There are two ways to run Manta, from the simple command line interface bin/manta or through a python extension. Instructions for loading a triangle mesh using trianglesceneviewer.

Contributing

Manta is an open source research project, and we welcome useful feature additions, bug fixes and performance improvements. If you'd like to contribute to Manta, see the Contributing page for more info. There a number of things to be done on the Wishlist.

Questions

Notes on the repository trunk.

• Manta Architecture
• Using transactions and callbacks.

• Why do I get more than four threads with -np 4?
• How do I import a model?
• Interface change in r1221 MantaInterface vs. Factory.
• Many things remain to be done, see the wishlist.

Screen Shots

More screen shots.

The trunk contains kd-tree code for rendering the Boeing 777 dataset as well as volume code for rendering hundred gigabyte volumes.

Older Branches

Occasionally the Manta repository is branched to allow unrestricted development of a certain feature. These branches are no longer active.

• itanium2/ branch
• AFR/ branch

Scenes

Manta scenes are dynamically loaded modules which contain code for configuring the renderer's scene graph. Each scene accepts specific command line arguments. (Additional scenes, beyond those listed below appear in the repository.)

• Iso-surface rendering: octisovol

Benchmarks

• Command lines for benchmarks

Benchmark tools

• Creating camera paths to take a sequence of screenshots.
• Benchmarks with manta_path_plot.pl
• Benchmarks with manta_tile_size.pl

Help

For help, you can send email to the "manta@sci.utah.edu" mailing list.