Basic ray-tracing

radiance-general
1

Hello,

Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?

I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a ray-tracing background.

Cheers,

Philippe

2

Hi again

Radiance is probably not the best tool to start rendering or to explore
ray-tracing theory. It has since the beginnings a lot of optimisations to
be physically accurate but still reasonable fast. Because physical lighting
and daylighting applications were the main purpose other features like
shaders or caustics or particles are not well supported or not there at all.

On the other hand, Greg Ward has been supporting Radiance for a lifetime
and has provided very detailed documentation and comments via this mailing
list (or those that came before). There is also a very good documentation
on the concepts and algorithms used in Radiance included in the "Rendering
for Radiance" book. I don't know of any other renderer that has something
like that.

So, in terms of studying and understanding raytracing you can do worse than
Radiance. If you just want to create nice pictures you are probably better
of with other renderers.

Regards,
Thomas

···

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Philippe de Rochambeau <[email protected]>wrote:

Hello,

Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?

I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it
for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a
ray-tracing background.

Cheers,

Philippe
_______________________________________________
Radiance-general mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.radiance-online.org/mailman/listinfo/radiance-general

3

PBRT is a good alternative:

  http://www.pbrt.org/

-Greg

···

From: Philippe de Rochambeau <[email protected]>
Date: January 5, 2013 6:44:20 AM PST

Hello,

Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?

I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a ray-tracing background.

Cheers,

Philippe

4

Yeah, what Greg said. PBRT is actually companion software to the excellent text, also advertised at that site. Here's the Amazonian scoop:

- Rob

···

On Jan 5, 2013, at 11:37 AM, Greg Ward <[email protected]> wrote:

PBRT is a good alternative:

  http://www.pbrt.org/

-Greg

From: Philippe de Rochambeau <[email protected]>
Date: January 5, 2013 6:44:20 AM PST

Hello,

Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?

I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a ray-tracing background.

Cheers,

Philippe

_______________________________________________
Radiance-general mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.radiance-online.org/mailman/listinfo/radiance-general

5

Dear Phillipe,

PBRT, the software and the book, are a great way of learning how raytracers work and are relatively straightforward to modify (I'm a fairly experienced but self-taught C and C++ programmer and I could manage to add some features relevant to vision science, which is what I do for a living). Luxrender is a fork of PBRT (both are open source, as is RADIANCE) but luxrender has some more advanced features (especially in terms of volume properties). If you start with PBRT then it is a relatively painless move to luxrender (which integrates really well with a variety of modelling systems). I started with RADIANCE though, but mainly as a user rather than a programmer.

I still wish RADIANCE had a sophisticated volume system but I guess it is too far away from its primary purpose - there are a lot of people in vision science who use RADIANCE who'd use it!

cheers,

Bob Kentridge
Dept.of Psychology, University of Durham, UK

···

________________________________________
From: Rob Guglielmetti [[email protected]]
Sent: 05 January 2013 19:41
To: Radiance general discussion
Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] Basic ray-tracing

Yeah, what Greg said. PBRT is actually companion software to the excellent text, also advertised at that site. Here's the Amazonian scoop:

- Rob

On Jan 5, 2013, at 11:37 AM, Greg Ward <[email protected]> wrote:

PBRT is a good alternative:

      http://www.pbrt.org/

-Greg

From: Philippe de Rochambeau <[email protected]>
Date: January 5, 2013 6:44:20 AM PST

Hello,

Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?

I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a ray-tracing background.

Cheers,

Philippe

_______________________________________________
Radiance-general mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.radiance-online.org/mailman/listinfo/radiance-general

_______________________________________________
Radiance-general mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.radiance-online.org/mailman/listinfo/radiance-general