[Radiance-general] real-time animation

[Bernhard Spanlang]

Hi,


There was a short discussion on Intertactive Radiance on this list recently
with the subject "Radiance and VR".
Basically you have two options:
1. Use the Holodeck rholo tools that come with Radiance 3.4+
Advantage:
you get all the reflectance effects that you would get when rendering a
single image.

Disadvantage:
You can only view the scenes with the rholo tools.
Level of interactivity depends on the preprocessing time.

2. Write your own tool that exports VRML with textures or vertex colours
from Radiance:
I worked on that problem a bit last year and gave a presentation at the
Radiance workshop.
http://www.radiance-online.org/radiance-workshop1/cd/Spanlang/index.html
Basically the  system uses Radiance to create texture maps (lightmaps) for
all surfaces in the scene. The texture maps
are then converted to jpeg to be interactively rendered in a VRML browser.
In its current state it is only usable by me.
If I had time to implement it again I would probably use the rad2mgf and
mgf2inv tools to convert the
geometry from Radiance to VRML (Inventor).
To avoid texture memory problems it may be better to generate vertex colours
instead of texture maps.

Advantage:
You can view it in any VRML browser and convert it to other formats for
interactive viewing.

Disadvantage:
Only works properly with perfectly diffuse reflecting materials.
Will require some development efforts.



Bernhard