[Radiance-general] Radiance Vs Radiosity

[Rob Guglielmetti]

On May 25, 2004, at 8:16 PM, Mark de la Fuente wrote:

> Rob, Could not agree more.  I think people put quite a bit of stock in 
> a well rendered image and the arguments can get blurred.  Especially 
> when you are talking about something as subjective as lighting as a 
> whole.  Are you after accurate results for research purposes, close 
> enough results, convincing pictures, etc? 

The problem with convincing pictures is that a lot of clients don't 
have the eye to spot the con jobs.  People are easily fooled by a slick 
image that looks nice, but the image can easily be telling a false 
story.  You mention the subjectivity of lighting, and now I couldn't 
agree with you more; this is one of the things that fascinates me about 
Radiance, is that the Radiance image format is so much more than a 
picture -- it's a rich dataset.  And the Radiance toolkit includes all 
these other great tools to extract that data and manipulate it, in ways 
that tell an honest story.  pcond obviously comes to mind here.

> I know we have some very impressive images here in our office that 
> were developed with the latest Lightscape/Viz that look (and were 
> developed to look) identical to the photos they were extrapolated 
> from.  And the associated false color images actually gain a certain 
> amount of credibility based simply on how "real" the renderings look.  
> Which as you pointed out has nothing to do with the accuracy of the 
> calculation result since the ray-traced part does not affect the 
> numerical results!  ;)

Right!  It's funny, I've been doing this for quite a while now (first 
with Lumen Micro & AGI, then Lightscape, and now Radiance) and I have a 
pretty boring collection of images.  But my images (and data) tell a 
richer story than the pretty pictures, to me and my colleagues.  There 
are a few gifted people on this list who have mastered Radiance to the 
point that they can produce physically accurate AND pretty pictures, 
and I guess the rest of us settle for accuracy over slick glamour.  All 
of us are using these tools to pursue the elusive goal of simulating 
reality, and to me that's just incredibly cool.  I'm intrigued by the 
slick renderings coming out of the top visualization firms, and more 
impressed every day.  But it's not what I want to do.  I want to 
produce renderings that are tools.  I wish the industry as a whole 
recognized the value of them more than they do.

=================
    Rob Guglielmetti
www.rumblestrip.org