Differences in Mac and PC renderings

[jo]

Hi,

Uh.. Shouldn't portable libraries like those from boost avoid exactly this problem?

Not that I'm aware of. boost does provide a number of mathematical tools but they are mostly higher level than the stuff we're talking about.

We do actually use boost for a number of things, BTW.

Regards,

Jo

[jo]

Hi,

I dual boot a couple of my Macs (quad boot one of them, OS X, Vista, Win 7 and Ubuntu ). I will try a render on Mac and Windows but even on the same machine I would expect there to still be differences. I don't think Windows and OS X share the exact same "numeric environment", if you see what I mean. Even above the processor level the OS still has influence over the way numeric computation is done.

Regards,

Jo

[cr1]

One of the computers runs on Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit) with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33 GHz and 4 GB RAM.
The other one runs on Mac OS X 10.5.8 with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 1 GB RAM.

So yes, both are using Intel processors.

Anyways, I think the only way to use the computers efficiently is to carefully plan my animations so that I can render them on both computers and then blend them together without degrading the final visual experience.

Depending on different aspects of the animation you might be able to render the first half on PC and the second on Mac with a certain overlap on both ends to be able to blend them together in the middle.

[Hubert_Holin]

Paris (U.E.), le 22/05/2010

Uh.. Shouldn't portable libraries like those from boost avoid exactly this problem?

Bonjour

As Jo pointed out, Boost does not aim to do that, at present. Were there to be sufficient demand, then we (most likely: I) could put forward a library. However, demand has not materialized in the past so it is unlikely to be there in the future, at least the rather near future. Furthermore, we had only developed what we felt we needed (though of course I could develop the theory forward). As a technical aside, the implementation I did way back then was in C, whereas I have since moved on to use mostly C++ (and python), and I remember that there was some ugliness in the interface due to some limitations in the template mechanism (which may have been removed in the forthcoming 0x standard, no make that the 1x standard ;-)  ). Last but unfortunately not least, as things stand today, between my day work and helping my kids do their homework, it's a wonder I can sleep even a few hours a day, so it would not be ready any time soon... But of course I would love to do so!

Hubert Holin (ranting again...)