Getting the Render Code to work...

In order to render the millions of particles I'm going to need efficiently, I'm going to be working with some C code created by Frank Summers at STScI.  He uses it to render stars, gas, etc for press release visualizations, and has recently reworked it to take some of the work we did this summer into account.  I'll be modifying the code as necessary for my purposes.

Step 1 of getting my particles into the render code, is to get the render code to work on my machine.  After a couple hours of monkeying around and some help from the VIZ help desk, the code was able to be run successfully.  Here's the test image I got out:

According to Frank, this is exactly what I should be getting.  YEAH!

*** Update: 2nd test with both gas and star splats.  1920x1080 resolution, ~ 13.5 minute render time.