Cross Platform Substitute Tips

This information is lifted mostly from Vol. 1 of the Handbook series, Rendering with mental ray. I will present it from the perspective of what I would consider is a typical setup. I would think normally that you'd want 3D applications running on Windows PCs to be able to be rendered on Linux machines running standalone mental ray in some sort of renderfarm setup.

If the MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE variable does not exist, mental ray defaults to the substitution:
/.dll$/.so/ /.obj$/.o/ /.lib$/.a/ /^[a-z]:// /^[A-Z]:// %\%/%
on a linux machine.

MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE can be set to a substitution string list of the form: /search/replace/ and instead of / as a delimiter, any character except whitespace may be used that does not appear in either the search or the replace strings. So, in the above default there are six substitutions. The last one uses % as a delimiter in order to reverse backslashes to slashes, ie %\%/%

There are several special tokens:

• caret(^) and backquote(`) stand for the beginning of the filename,
• dollar sign ($) stands for the end of the file name,
• question mark (?) stands for any character
• square bracketed range ([a-z]) stands for any characer the the ASCII range a through z

Personally, I like using the default .bash_profile environment mechanism on Linux, so such an addition might look like this:

MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE='/.dll$/.so/ /.obj$/.o/ /.lib$/.a/ /^[a-z]:// /^[A-Z]:// %\%/% % C:/yourWinPath/%/yourLinuxPath/%'
export MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE

If you use .cshrc, you'd probably use something that looks more like:

setenv MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE '/.dll$/.so/ /.obj$/.o/ /.lib$/.a/ /^[a-z]:// /^[A-Z]:// %\%/% % C:/yourWinPath/%/yourLinuxPath/%'