Hi,
I'm looking for a renderer to produce still images of scenes
of polygonal data. I want the beautiful pictures and type of
effects achieved by raytracing and radiosity. However, I'm
not concerned with absolute accuracy and fidelity to reality
which seems to be Radiance's strength.
Given the above, would using Radiance be overkill? And
would I be paying a large penalty in performance (and complexity
of specification) to get the kind of accuracy I don't need.
Would I be better off with Povray or Mental Ray or some
other renderer?
Also, does anyone have some examples of final images along with
how long they took to render, polygon count, number of lights, image
resolution, cpu type/speed, and any other parameters that have a major
impact on speed/quality. That might help me get an idea of whether it's
well suited to what I need.
Thanks,
Bob
Hi!
effects achieved by raytracing and radiosity. However, I'm
not concerned with absolute accuracy and fidelity to reality
which seems to be Radiance's strength.
In fact, radiance is simulation software with high accuracy. But
you can fine-tune all parameters, so can use it as a simple
renderer. If you are concerned about performance, take a look
at the ambient parameters, they have the biggest impact on
rendering time. Excluding most materials from ambient calculation
and setting good av-values might help.
Of course, radiance is not an easy renderer, but you get lots
of very powerful tools for cad-import, image processing, previews
and scripting tools.
Good luck, cu Lars.
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Lars Grobe wrote:
...
Of course, radiance is not an easy renderer, but you get lots of very powerful tools for cad-import, image processing, previews and scripting tools.
PovRay is unkown to me, but I liked Rayshade a lot more for just-image-rendering in terms of first-time handling and ease. PovRay may be more monolithic and canned-feature rich. Using Radiance's suite of programs without practice is like navigating a race car through a pedestrian area. Otherwise it's quite powerful, although RenderMan seems to have an even more powerful functional language.
Greg developped the core on a Sun 68040 machine years ago, so Radiance's raytracing engine had to be nicely optimized.
-Peter
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pab-opto, Freiburg, Germany, www.pab-opto.de