SUNFLOW(1)

💖 SUNFLOW — the sunflow manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so. you're looking at the sunflow(1) page from the SUNFLOW DOCUMENTATION set. buckle up, we're rendering pretty pictures 🌸

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✨ NAME ✨

sunflow — rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

sunflow [option(s)] file(s)

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so sunflow is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. it's written in Java (yes bestie, Java, we love her) and it's built around a flexible ray tracing core plus an extensible object-oriented design. it was literally created as a framework for experimenting with global illumination algorithms and new surface shading models. main character energy fr fr 👑

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✨ GENERAL OPTIONS ✨

want the tea on what options exist? here's how you get a summary:

• -h, -help — displays the list of available commands 💅

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✨ PERFORMANCES ✨

ngl this part matters. Sunflow will run considerably faster with the so called server VM (Virtual Machine). this server VM is part of Java, but it's not included in the standard (JRE) installation of Java. the server VM starts up more slowly and uses more memory than the standard VM, but it runs a lot faster in many cases. it's giving "slow to wake up, unstoppable once she's up" 😭

Sunflow's built-in realtime raytracing benchmark (-rtbench) for example runs more than twice as fast with the server VM (exact speedup depends on your hardware). yes, more than double. ate. 🔥

the easiest way to get the server VM is by installing the Java Development Kit (JDK).

On Debian, it is possible to install different JVM at the same time, amongst which: gij-4.2 (main), openjdk-6-jre (main), sun-java5-jre (non-free), sun-java6-jre (non-free). to change the java link from one to another, use (with root privileges):

update-alternatives --config java

a pretty good choice should be openjdk-6-jre 👑

See also the CONFIGURATION FILES section below, iykyk 💜

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✨ SUGGESTED OPTIONS ✨

as explained above, the following options can be used to obtain a performance gain, but they depend on the JVM used:

• -server — use the server virtual machine. the JDK matching the selected JVM has to be installed for this option to actually work, e.g. sun-java5-jdk (non-free). a warning will be displayed otherwise, and this option ignored. ⚠️
• -XmxMEM — use a memory upper limit of MEM instead of the default (probably 64M). examples of valid values: 512M, 1G. 🫶

those options are best set through the SUNFLOW_JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable, or stored in the configuration files.

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✨ CONFIGURATION FILES ✨

to allow flexible configuration, the sunflow wrapper sources two configuration files: /etc/sunflowrc and ~/.sunflowrc, in this order.

the syntax is simple "export KEY=VALUE". lines beginning with a sharp sign are ignored. 🎀

the following options are supported:

• SUNFLOW_JAVA — the java virtual machine to use. it's then possible to have e.g. a system-wide java alternative pointing to /usr/bin/gij-4.2, while sunflow uses a different JVM, e.g. /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.12/bin/java.

if not set (the default), java will be called, meaning the system-wide alternative will be used.

• SUNFLOW_JAVA_OPTIONS — those are the options to be passed to the java interpreter, see above for examples. ✨
• SUNFLOW_OPTIONS — the list of options to pass to sunflow automatically to avoid repeating them on each invocation of sunflow. quotation marks are needed if more than one option is specified.

if not set (the default), no option is passed to sunflow.

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

/usr/share/doc/sunflow/README.Debian 📖

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

Sunflow was written by Christopher Kulla <ckulla@gmail.com>.

This manual page was written by Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others). it is licensed under the same terms as the package itself. 💜

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okay that's the whole thing bestie, you're officially a sunflow expert now 🌈💅

version 0.07.2.svn396, dated 2019-09-03 — and that's the tea, periodt ✨🦋🎀