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Programming stuff

FAQs
These are effectively programming FAQs that I started doing for myself because none existed. In many cases these FAQs also cover for deficiencies in the manuals that come with each of the packages. Many of these questions (and answers) have been culled from mailing lists I'm subscribed to. Credits are where they're due.

Softimage|SAAPHIRE
Softimage|SAAPHIRE is the SDK API for Softimage|3D, the 3D modeling package. This API is fairly extensive and allows an almost complete control over the database aspects of Softimage|3D (eg. object manipulation, querying, creation, deletion etc).
mental ray
mental ray is an extremely versatile and powerful raytracing engine from mental images. It has built-in threading, network rendering and an API for creating shader creating shaders (all versions) and constructing geometry directly in code (versions 2.0 and up only).

Noodles
Here are some C snippets and other sorts that I've written which might be helpful to people.

memory allocation checker (zip, tgz)
This a .c file plus a header defining a memory allocation library which rides on top of malloc. It checks for such things as reallocing or freeing unknown blocks, automatic guard checking for block overwriting (both before and after) and dumping of unused blocks when finished. It's thread-safe so it can be used with mental ray. (Yeah, Angus, I finally did it).
A working rshd for NT. (application zip, source zip)
After having bashed my head twelfty-seven times against the wall trying out the various so-called rshd 'implementations' on NT, I gave up and wrote my own. It's got only two extra features, which also happen to be useful: regexp subsitution and IP filtering. It also has adheres to the maxim 'small is beautiful', about 24K for the runtime.
The source is for MSVC++ 6.0. But I guess you can use any Win32 compatible C compiler environment.

There should be more stuff added to this as I often as I can be bothered. You know how it is: Tomorrow is the best time-saving device in the world. Don't even bother to think yourself above that maxim. You've been guilty too and you know it.