[Radiance-general] Hardware accelerated radiance

[Michael Kruger]

Has anyone done any work on integrating radiance with a hardware 
solution? I'm thinking of porting the basics of radiance to an FPGA with 
a view to (near-)realtime rendering from AutoCAD or similar. I'm 
currently evaluating previous work in this area, and so far it appears 
that the most difficult bit of the problem would be the hardware 
implementation of complex functions for procedural textures and surface 
models - in particular the generic lookup tables for images / function 
data. Other than that it's just a lot of legwork... am I missing something?

Has anyone tried this in the past? Perhaps a different type of hardware 
acceleration? Please let me know if you've got any success / horror 
stories! :)

mike

ps: Another major problem for point + shoot rendering from 3D modeling 
programs is ensuring oconv has a bounded finishing time for any given 
model. Most models I work with in AutoCAD or Lightwave (exporter coming 
Real Soon!) need extensive conversion work before oconv will run to 
completion. (Most often it simply runs continuously until it dies 
because it uses up all available memory. >4GB! ) Are other people having 
similar problems?