[Radiance-general] Sunlight through glass

[Pierre-Felix Breton]

And I think we are still interested about it!

But money talks and we need to satisfy both worlds  (nice images and
physically based rendering to some extents).  But I agree with most of what
Jack has been said here..

Regards,

Pierre-Félix Breton
----------------------------------------------------
(speaking as a 3ds max product specialist here - having participated in the
Lightscape 3.2 -->viz radiosity work...)
  


-----Original Message-----
From: radiance-general-bounces at radiance-online.org
[mailto:radiance-general-bounces at radiance-online.org] On Behalf Of Jack de
Valpine
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 9:23 AM
To: Radiance general discussion
Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] Sunlight through glass


Hi Giullio and others following this thread,

<RANT MODE>
It seems to me that this is a problem with proprietary shrink wrap software
renderers. Who really knows what is going on under the hood, whose word
should be taken for the validity of the physical model, what validations
have occurred?!

Users see the product marketing materials that talk about Global
Illumination and "physical accuracy," and they believe the hype! That seems
to me to be pretty dangerous if you are going to be using the tool to
somehow "validate" design issues!

I know that there are systems that have implemented GI to varying degrees
and sophistication. But the problem is you probably have to be an uber
expert to use them and/or code up custom material/lighting shaders. Still
though the question is what validation has occurred. I think that most
commercial renderers and users of said systems are really not that
interested in physical validity, they are most interested in the
outcome/appearance of the final image. It does not really matter how it get
there.

It seems to me that the one commercial product that showed some hope in its
original (pre-acquisition) form was Lightscape. However, Rob Guglielmetti
has explored and written pretty extensively on this topic seemingly with
only partial satisfaction (my apologies to Rob G. for such a cursory
summary, he did some really excellent work on this). Note I also believe
that the original developers of Lightscape were truly interested in enabling
people to use a tool with a reasonable and practical level of physical
validity.
</RANT MODE>

Best,

-Jack

giulio antonutto wrote: 
About MR history and current situation (
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10185).
Well the whole thing started a while ago when the promised and sold the
certainty to get a finished software for a certain time (last September).
This did not happened (they are still speaking of final candidate version
RC0.5 and so on).
The software is not yet finished (it is not version 1.0).
Not yet implemented on all the platform where was supposed to run (on Mac is
still beta although they promised something in the next ‘24’ hours) and
doesn’t support all the plug-ins for 3d application that are indicated on
the web page.
This doesn’t sound so appealing to me as well and I would understand
somebody delusion about the matter.

Having said that, I also need to add that I requested (as other friends did)
details about the physical accuracy of the renderer.
I never got an answer.
Is it itself an answer?
G.

PS these are my personal opinions. 
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