About radiance-online.org

Looking for the term Radiance ?

Radiance is a quantity in Physics (like voltage or length), specifying the amount of energy radiated in a given direction from a surface. Mostly used with non-ionizing, electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (light), ultra-violett (UV) or infrared (IR). More precisely, it's defined as radiated power over solid angle and "projected" area, the SI unit being [Watt/(m2 sr)]. Other websites (not related to us) with info on Physics and Optics: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu has a nice overview, and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiance has the math.

What is the Radiance lighting simulation tool ?

Radiance is also the name of a physically based rendering package written largely by Greg Ward, initially at LBNL, EPFL, then SGI, now running Anyhere Software. It is a physically-based, image-generating, backward raytracer with very a powerful rendering engine. It is used worldwide for lighting analysis and can generate accurate values for radiance/luminance (W/sr.m?,cd/m?) and irradiance/illuminance (W/m,Lux).

As a starting point, check the book Rendering with Radiance at our sister site radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/book, or consult the reference manual in PDF format (49 kbytes).

The software package became open source in December 2002, the new distribution license is available from http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/misc/license.txt.

Download from this server or from LBNL's website (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, California).

For detailed access, there's read access to the CVS source via ViewCVS, which allows downloading of individual files and browsing the history. A daily snapshot of current code is available as compressed tar file (tar ball). Write access to the source requires prior arrangement, please contact the development team at the development mailing list. Your contribution is valuable.

What is this site for ?– it for the radiance community!

Currenly we run a mailing list management system and host the source code of Radiance in a CVS repository. You're welcomed to subscribe to the lists by choosing a mailing list in the left hand frame or check for latest software development.

The general mailing list is now used by 300+ Radiance users worldwide as information exchange from A (ambient calculations) to Z (z-buffer file).

Since late in December 2004 this site runs a MySQL database that accumulates user feedback over the years, to get a feel what Radiance is used for and what features are missed most. Hopefully, this supports acedemic research proposals.

Hardware and maintainance of this site are contributed until July 2006 by a longtime Radiance user (Peter Apian-Bennewitz), connection to the Internet (100Mbit/s) and data backup are currently supplied by the IT department of Fraunhofer ISE research institute. Internal logs are kept strictly private. You'll see no banner advertisement here (well, at least in the current config) and spam filters are installed.

As of October 2006, I (P.A.-B.) still host and maintain this site (by my own stupid decision), although the domain and its costs are now transferred to and paid by LBNL now.

Subcribing to email lists

There are two larger mailing lists on this site: The general mailing list dealing with general questions about using Radiance (around 480 subscribed members), and the development list (around 120), which discusses design and implementation of the code. You may subscribe to either one or both using the links at the left hand side of this web page. Subscription is easy, fast and mandatory before posting to the list.

Sometimes the subscription doesn't seem to work for the subscriber. Postings are still rejected, although a subscription process had been completed. That happens in about 3% of the subscriptions and has been traced to a "feature" at the client side every time, at least so far. Since it causes slight ripples of gruntling at both sides, here's what happens:

Many institutions rewrite sender addresses in emails leaving their realm: The domain part (after the @) is rewritten to some canonical name. Example: You have set your email sender address in your mail program to [email protected], but it is rewritten to [email protected] when you are sending emails through xyz.edu's central computer systems. If you're on the road with your laptop, and sending emails to some provider, who does not rewrite the address, our mailing list programs receives your sender address as [email protected], which is not the same as [email protected]. Our mail program has no fail-safe way to recognize the two email addresses as belonging to the same person. So your posting with either one is denied if you had subscribed with the other one. The only way around this are two subscriptions, with mail delivery disabled on one of them (via the web interface).

Terms + Disclaimer

By subscribing or downloading you accept these terms:

Though precautions have been taken to prevent distribution of unsolicited emails through this list, you subscribe at your own risk: Subscribing to this list has the same level of risk (actually less of it) as by email in general: If someone should post by accident or on purpose (well, the Internet does not completely consists of good guys out there) something that, when redistributed, harms data on you computer, we, the ones operating the list and the site, should not be held responsible.

Download any data or program from this site at your own risk.

The list administrators reserve the right to deny service to anyone or remove anyone from these lists in case of abuse.

We higly encourage you to take any necessary steps to secure your email system when in contact to the Internet - accepting JavaScript in emails is a bad idea generally, not just for the Radiance mailing list. UNIX / Linux users may relax and smile a little.

THE MAINTAINERS OF THIS SITE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SITE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE LIST ADMINS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SITE.

It has been brought to our attention that people have received spam and infected emails with ''from'' lines giving [email protected]as sender. No such mail has been sent by us. The specific "from" line is faked. If you have received such emails, please check the headers of the mail to verify that it is actually neither sent by this site nor related to it. Do not open it.

[email protected]does not sent emails and even more certainly not with attachements.

Note the subscribed members: This does not mean we are infected. Just that some bloke on the Internet sents emails disguising as [email protected]. Email as it is today (SMTP) does not prevent theft of identity. Unless we'd sign every email automatically, which is technically possible, but not dealt with easily by the majority of today's email clients.

Tech bits

Feb 2011: 484 subscribed to radiance-general
4.6.2007: shutdown and ship to LBNL
21.5.2007: last days in Europe- the hardware is about to be shipped to LBNL. The partisans go mainstream... (340 subscribed members)
26.1.2007: John finally got all participants of 2006 workshop to submit their PDFs, so the files are here too.
20.10.2006: 3R8 release (318 subscribed members)
14.9.2006: got an excellent Leatherman pocket knife for keeping this damn thing running (thanks Greg!)
July 2006: domain transferred to LBNL, (server still the same)
31.5.2006: sent note to dev list that I'll bail out in July 2006
16.5.2006: replaced second failed harddisk (10 minutes downtime)
5.5.2006: 308 subscribed members
7.3.2006: replaced failed harddisk (RAID-1 setup, 5 year old, 780 days continous uptime)
16.1.2006: inaugurated HDR list
28.11.2005: minor work on server
2.11.2005: fixed minor mailman sec problem, 297 subscribed members
22.8.2005: 3R7P2 release , 288 subscribed members
10.2.2005: our web statistics don't list referers, search strings and agents any more, since this had been misused by other websites.
10.1.2005: email technical bit: changed our MTA helo greeting to a FQDN to appease some other MTAs which insist on it.
27.12.2004: first web based feed back form for Radiance users goes online
29.10.2004: 3R6P1 release , 271 subscribed members
July 2004: 263 subscribed members, configured radzilla mailing list (run by Carsten Bauer)
June 2004: 259 subscribed members
Februar 2004: 242 subscribed members, major SW update
October 2003: 211 subscribed members
September 2003: 195 subscribed members
August 2003: 180 subscribed members
June 2003: 158 subscribed members
21.3.2003: 3R5 release (first CVS based Radiance release), daily automatic backup of CVS files to external machine added
15.2.2003: start of future Radiance CVS distribution (beta tests)
10.12.2002: server upgrated with Adaptec hardware RAID and hot-swap disks
2.10.2002: added CD of Radiance workshop 1
10.7.2002: added htdig search engine for site and mailing list archives
11.6.2002: 116 subscribed members, inaugurated 'radiance-dev' mailing list for dev discussion
10.3.2002: 91 subscribed members
10.2.2002: 74 subscribed members
23.12.2001: daily backup of discussion lists
31.8.2001: Fixed bug in frame setup that prevented Opera and Konqueror viewers from displaying some pages.
31.1.2001: general and 3rd party mailing lists inaugurated
27.7.2000: domain registered

Peter Apian-Bennewitz

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