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# 6.3 Environment Variables

Environment variables can be set from a shell prompt with shell commands such as `setenv` (see the documentation of your shell) before mental ray, ivray, or the application that mental ray is built into, is started from the same shell. Environment variables set after mental ray is started, or set from a different shell, have no effect. mental ray will work without any environment variables, except that the `.rayrc` startup script may not be found if `MI_ROOT` is undefined.

- `DISPLAY`
  The Unix X11 display to be used for OpenGL acceleration.

- `HOME`
  Unix home directory, for finding the user's local `.rayrc` file.

- `HOMEDRIVE`
  Windows NT home drive, such as `C:`.

- `HOMEPATH`
  Windows NT home directory. mental ray will try to load `%HOMEDRIVE%/%HOMEPATH%/rayrc`.

- `MI_IVRAY_OPTIONS`
  Extra options inserted by the Inventor version of mental ray.

- `MI_LIBRARY_PATH`
  Another search path, used for `link` commands.

- `SI_LOCATION`
  The directory of the `linktab.ini` file, which is used by the Softimage|3D application for path mapping.

- `MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE`
  An optional list of blank-separated substitution instructions, each in the form `/search/replace/`. Any other character besides `/` will also work.

- `MI_RAY_INCPATH`
  A colon-separated or semicolon-separated list of paths to search for files included with the `$include` command.

- `MI_RAY_OPTIONS`
  Extra options that are inserted by mental ray before the options on the command line. This is commonly used for options such as `-xcolor`.

- `MI_RAY2_SERVICE`
  The IP service that mental ray uses to contact slaves on other machines. The default is `mi-ray2` for mental ray 2.x and `mi-ray3` for mental ray 3.x. On Unix, service names are defined in `/etc/services` or in the `services` NIS map.

- `MI_RAY_SERVICE`
  If the previous variable is not defined, this one is used instead. This makes mental ray 2.x compatible with mental ray 1.9 while allowing both to coexist on the same machine. The default is `mi-ray`.

- `MI_ROOT`
  The directory that mental ray searches for configuration files such as `rayrc`.

- `MI_STACKSIZE`
  New thread stacks will be created with this size in kilobytes if defined. The default is 16384 (16 MB) on Unix and 4096 on Windows NT. 4096 is nearly always sufficient except when very complex recursive shaders are used.

- `TMPDIR`
  A directory for temporary code or object files to be compiled or linked. The default is `/usr/tmp` on Unix and the current directory on Windows NT.

- `USER`
  The current user name. It is stored in RLA image file headers, and is optional.

Next: 6.4 Image Display: imf_disp Up: 6. Command Line Options Previous: 6.2 Inventor mental ray