[jpstewart]

After installing Qt as described in my last post, you'll need to do the following to install BMRT since it is required by flow.  Fortunately it is distributed as binaries, so there's no compiling this time and no patches needed.

1. Download http://nonfree.irix.cc/BMRT2.5h.mips4.tar.gz
   
2. Unpack the tar.gz file to a (temporary) location of your choosing.  (It will create a BMRT2.5 directory.)
   
3. Copy everything in BMRT2.5/bin to /opt/flow/bin.
   
4. Copy everything in BMRT2.5/lib to /opt/flow/lib32.
   
5. Copy everything in BMRT2.5/include to /opt/flow/include.
   
6. Create /opt/flow/shaders and copy the *.slc, *.sl, and *.h files from BMRT2.5/shaders to /opt/flow/shaders.
   
7. Set an environment variable SHADERS=.:/opt/flow/shaders in your .profile as instructed by BMRT2.5/README.
   
8. Optionally copy BMRT2.5/.rendribrc to $HOME/.rendribrc and configure it to suit your setup.  (Again, see the README.)
   

---

Finally, to compile and install flow itself here's what you'll need to do.

Edit: I forgot about the GLUT library requirement, so that's now added as step one.

1. Install the neko_glut package, which flow depends on.
   
2. Download flow from https://web.archive.org/web/201001180732...5.3.tar.gz as CyberMonkey suggested on the first page of this thread.
   
3. Unpack the tar.gz file to a location of your choosing.  (It will create a flow-0.5.3 directory.)
   
4. Download the patch attached to this post and save it as flow.diff in the newly created flow-0.5.3 directory.
   
5. In the flow-0.5.3 directory, run the following command:
   
   Code:

   patch -p1 <flow.diff
6. Run gmake.  This one only takes 5 minutes on my Octane.
   
7. Copy all the *.sl and *.slc files from flow-0.5.3/Shaders to /opt/flow/shaders.
   
8. Copy flow-0.5.3/bin/flow to /opt/flow/bin/flow.
   
9. Set the environment variable FLOWHOME as instructed in flow-0.5.3/INSTALL
   

You should now be able to type 'flow' on the command line to launch the application!

It's been a long day, so if I've made a mistake in these instructions please forgive me!  If you have problems or questions, I check these forums daily (sometimes twice a day).  And like I said earlier, I'll try to get a binary package ready too.

(You can also delete the qt-2.2.4, BMRT2.5, and flow-0.5.3 directories that were created along the way if you want to.  Everything important is installed in /opt/flow by now.  They do contain some examples and documentation that might be helpful.  But those are topics for another day....)

[hamei]

if I've made a mistake please forgive me! 

Who's the feller owns this shithole ? 

[indigofan]

if I've made a mistake please forgive me! 

Who's the feller owns this shithole ? 

Tried and failed, looks like I'll be sitting on the fence for the binary package..

[jpstewart]

At long last, I have a binary package available.  It's approximately 22MB in size and unpacks to about 80MB.  It will install everything needed (Qt, BMRT, Flow) under /opt/flow.  It will put a README in /opt/flow/doc/README with configuration instructions and pointers to further documentation.  If you still have questions after reading that, let me know.

The package is a simple .tar.gz that you can gunzip and then extract with tar.  It should be considered "beta" quality at best.  After I get some feedback here, I'll probably create a tardist with proper dependency tracking and so on.

Any and all feedback (good or bad; about the packaging, its documentation, or the build instructions) is greatly appreciated.  I'm sure the packaging and my documentation will need polishing, but I don't know exactly what until I hear from you folks.

Here's a screenshot of flow displaying one of its included sample scenes:

   

The binaries can be downloaded from http://www.personalprojects.net/flow.tar.gz for now.  That's probably not a permanent URL;  it's just a convenient place at the moment.  Raion, if you want to add it to your non-free collection go ahead.  (It contains BMRT which is non-free.)  If you prefer to wait for tardists, let me know.

I sure hope it all works!

[indigofan]

At long last, I have a binary package available.  It's approximately 22MB in size and unpacks to about 80MB.  It will install everything needed (Qt, BMRT, Flow) under /opt/flow.  It will put a README in /opt/flow/doc/README with configuration instructions and pointers to further documentation.  If you still have questions after reading that, let me know.

The package is a simple .tar.gz that you can gunzip and then extract with tar.  It should be considered "beta" quality at best.  After I get some feedback here, I'll probably create a tardist with proper dependency tracking and so on.

Any and all feedback (good or bad; about the packaging, its documentation, or the build instructions) is greatly appreciated.  I'm sure the packaging and my documentation will need polishing, but I don't know exactly what until I hear from you folks.

Here's a screenshot of flow displaying one of its included sample scenes:



The binaries can be downloaded from http://www.personalprojects.net/flow.tar.gz for now.  That's probably not a permanent URL;  it's just a convenient place at the moment.  Raion, if you want to add it to your non-free collection go ahead.  (It contains BMRT which is non-free.)  If you prefer to wait for tardists, let me know.

I sure hope it all works!

JP, nice work indeed, I have it up and running and rendering a first animation of some particle blob that I created.. Sweet!

Here's some feedback after going through all the steps, getting all the dependancies for Imagemagick loaded took the most time in the whole process.

This line in the help documentation, maybe it needs or does not need the equal sign, but I matched all the other entries in the .profile file and they all don't have the equal sign. I guess if you want to add the PATH for the binary as well, you need the equal sign to point to the binary location.

So, it would read:

setenv FLOWHOME /usr/people/USERNAME/FlowData; set path=(/opt/flow $FLOWHOME/bin $path)

I believe...... 

In order to use any Qt application, you may need to set the environment
variable QTDIR=/opt/flow in your .profile.  See doc/qt-2.2.4/INSTALL for
further information.

Should read;

In order to use any Qt application, you may need to set the environment
variable QTDIR /opt/flow in your .profile.  See doc/qt-2.2.4/INSTALL for
further information.


Should include a line about setting the FLOWHOME variable in the .login file as well.


mkdir $home/FlowData

Add in your .profile file a line with=

setenv FLOWHOME "/usr/people/YOURUSERHOME/FlowData"

[Raion]

If you're using GNU bash or ksh then .profile will work, if you use csh or tcsh you will need to use setenv in .cshrc

[jpstewart]

Thanks for the note, indigofan.

As Raion says, it's the difference between Bourne shell (plain sh, Bash, ksh, and others) syntax and csh (and derivatives) syntax. As a long-time user (>20 years) of the sh family of shells I tend to forget about the csh line.

It might be better to just say "set variable FOO to value" and hope that users know what the right syntax is for their own shell. Or point out both the "FOO=value" and "setenv FOO value" variants. I think some of the upstream documents did it that way.

[Irinikus]

A great thank you to JP and indigofan for this!

It's alway nice to see a new piece of software made available for these machines!

I got it up and running on my tezro and created the script file shown in my screenshots, allowing me to launch it from my icon catalog, at the simple click of a mouse button!

Here's the scene rendering @1920x1080: (Note that only one CPU is being used!)



Here's the complete rendering:

[Gamefan]

That looks great Irinikus!

Nice work everyone is getting this working on SGI.

[jpstewart]

Has anyone tried Hamei's suggestion from page 1 about using Graphics Magick's convert utility instead of the one from Image Magick?  I'm curious if that works, but I don't know where/when it gets called by flow so it's kind of hard for me to test accurately.