Applying New Features of Radiance 3.5

Greg Ward

In this full-day tutorial, the speaker will explain new features introduced to Radiance since the book Rendering with Radiance was published in 1998. In particular, we wish to cover some useful new features found in version 3.5 of the software.

Holodeck Rendering

 The rholo program, introduced in Radiance 3.4, was created to allow for interactive rendering in complex environments, allowing easy movement and full lighting effects. Think of it an enhanced rview program. In addition to providing free movement, rholo also records every view ray traced, which can be applied in subsequent views, and provides for parallel rendering computations. The time involved to set up a holodeck structure is small compared to the time it will save in deciding which views to rendering and aiding in decisions about the space.

After a detailed introduction to the theory behind this new system, the speaker will give some demonstrations and explain the other associated holodeck programs.

The mesh Primitive

New to Radiance 3.5, the mesh primitive provides a more efficient storage of complicated surface meshes, and includes for the first time the ability to explicitly specify uv texture coordinates and surface normals. The main purpose of this new primitive is to permit the modeling of very complex, smooth or irregular surfaces in a modest amount of memory. Input to the new mesh compiler, obj2mesh, is an Alias/Wavefront .OBJ file, which may be produced by the new version of gensurf.

After giving an overview of this new primitive, the speaker will offer an example or two as well as some excuses as to why itÕs not working exactly right in the official 3.5 release. (The HEAD distribution has it working, though.)

The ranimove Program

Also new in Radiance 3.5 is the ranimove program, which offers a new level of control over animation renderings. Unlike ranimate, this new tool does not simply run other Radiance programs. Instead, it drives the rendering engine directly to compute samples only where they are needed, performing its own simulation of motion blur for moving objects. The ranimove program also permits one to control the importance of various objects in the animation, focusing rendering effort on certain parts of the scene deemed to be more significant.

After giving an overview of the general ideas behind ranimove, the speaker will show an example of how to use this new program, along with some typical results.

PowerPoint Presentation (7.4 Mbytes)

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