Radiance Tutorial for Windows

radiance-general
#1

Hi Radiance Community,

I was hoping for some guidance in using Radiance as I’m a new user. I’ve been trying to follow various tutorials for new users but one problem I’ve been running into is that these tutorials are not made for Windows OS. With that being said, I did manage to find one tutorial on Youtube… unfortunately, it’s not in English.

Running this tutorial I ran into a fatal error running icons which the user did not get for some reason. Trying to troubleshoot my way out, I found a post where another user got the same error watching the same tutorial. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up.
Does anyone know why I’m getting this error? In addition, are there any tutorials for Windows anyone come across?

#2

Welcome to the Radiance forum. Not being familiar with this tutorial, can you provide the specific command and input files that you were using?

In general, most Unix-style Radiance commands will also work on Windows. There may be a few syntactic differences when operating on Windows, such as replacing \ with ^, $ with %, and the fact that commands in back ticks (`) will not work on Windows. If a particular command is tripping you up when you use it on Windows, you can ask about it here.

Nathaniel

#3

Hi Nathaniel, thanks for getting back to me and the welcome. Below is a screenshot I took of the room.rad, sky.mat, and the command prompt.

Radiance
Radiance3440×1398 306 KB

#4

I assume that you added the “wood” material definition manually, as the commands you show would not create the material.

This worked for me when I ran it in Windows command line, but when I ran the same thing in Windows PowerShell, I got the error:
oconv: fatal - (room.rad): undefined modifier " ■#"

The difference is that PowerShell is producing 16-bit characters, rather than ASCII characters. So if you run this in the regular Windows command line it will work, but you should not use PowerShell.

Nathaniel

#5

Great! It works… all the tutorials seems to going well as of the time of this post. Thanks a lot Nathaniel!