[Radiance-general] coherent advice on running Radiance on win32

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Jack de Valpine wrote:

> OK, now to potentially add fuel to the flame fest fire.... Our 
> in-house workflow is based on a production process where the 3d 
> modeling application(s) are decoupled from the rendering application, 
> eg they are not an integrated solution. I prefer to think that they 
> are best in breed solutions. And there are a whole host of reasons 
> that make decoupling rendering from modeling very important and 
> useful. Modeling occurs in one set of preferred applications while 
> rendering/simulation occurs in another, Radiance. The different 
> applications have different user interfaces. Because of this, 
> different os's are needed to run the preferred applications, it is 
> just a simple fact of life.

Amen.  Allow me to respond to Jelle's original post, as from what I can 
tell, the references to winbashing are directed at me.  I may have said 
something to the effect that Windows isn't a "real" os.  Maybe that was 
a cheap shot, but let's look at the facts.  Unix flavors boast many 
tools to facilitate working with Radiance, such as multiprocessing 
support, robust shells that are scriptable (yes, cross platform 
scripting tools like Python, Perl, et al. have negated this one a bit, 
but then again Jelle's point is about Radiance access to the masses and 
the masses aren't necessarily gonna be Python wizards) and of course 
full support of the toolbox model _which is exactly the paradigm that 
Radiance was constructed to work in_. 

I struggled with Linux for a long time to get a usable system and get 
Radiance compiled, way back in the day.  Sure, most people aren't as 
stubborn as I am and perhaps we're losing new users to the dread of 
having to become a Unix sysadmin just to use a "program" like Radiance.  
But let me tell you something else: you know who told me to stick to my 
guns and learn Radiance from the unix shell?  It was none other than 
Schorsch himself, about eight years ago!  Now eight years is a long 
time, and since then the windows binaries have, well, they've appeared 
in the first place, and only improved since then.  But there are still 
bugs and missing tools.  I agree with Jack that there's a disconnect 
between the rendering and modleing processes, and as he and others have 
said in this thread, the best tool for the job is what you want to be 
using.  There is no doubt that it can be a gigantic PITA to have to buy, 
maintain and bounce between systems to accomplish the tasks at hand.  
But many of us have devised a workflow that allows a relatively smooth 
transition from the modeling side -- usually done on Windows systems -- 
to the rendering/calculation side, usually done on an OS X Mac or a 
Linux box and found the benefits to be worth the efforts.

Ignacio's nrv is indeed a very exciting new addition to the Windows 
radiance practicioner's toolkit. Francesco's mingw binaries and 
Schorsch's binaries that ship with Rayfront are great ways to try 
radiance on Windows.  I absolutely agree that Cygwin is awful and DTR & 
I did not get along well either.  I wouldn't wish those on anyone.  But 
I still feel like the best way to get involved with Radiance for the 
typical Windows user is to get your hands on a spare machine that you 
can install Linux on. Many users have chimed in on this thread with 
good, constructive ways of using two machines to get the job done.  If a 
decent cad program -- let me rephrase that: a cad program that was 
accurate and that this AutoCAD user could figure out in minimal time -- 
would ever come out for OS X, I'd say a Mac OS X computer is all you 
need.  I've been waiting for that for four and a half years now, 
though.  the new BootCamp and Parallels options available to Intel Mac 
users are promising, in that they offer the ability to use one hardware 
platform to host all your best of breed apps, in the OS they require. 
But as Greg said BootCamp requires back and forth rebooting to change 
OSes, which, stinks.  I beta tested Parallels, which can run unix and 
Windows in parallel.  It was pretty fast at first, but strangely enough 
got slower and more buggy with each interim release.  The final release 
is now available and I'm still debating whether to give it one more 
chance.  But I digress.

Clearly, the current state of the Windows tools allow users to exploit a 
good deal of the Radiance toolkit today, on Windows, should they wish to 
do so.  But I maintain that it's still not perfect, and still has its 
own litany of downloads and workarounds needed to install it and use 
it.  I mean, you don't just double-click setup.exe and start rendering.  
So my feeling is that if it's a struggle either way, why not try to use 
Radiance in the environment it was conceived in?  AFAIK, I never told 
anyone to use Cygwin or DTR.  I'll bite my tongue re: Windows in general 
from now on.  I'll try.  But I will also stand by my assertion that Unix 
is still the best platform on which to run Radiance.  I don't think 
anyone here gave out INcoherent information regarding anything.  
Opinions differ, that's all.

Maybe a coherent Win/Radiance HOWTO can be part of the 
radiance-online.org knowledgebase as that moves forward.  I ain't gonna 
write it, but I agree with you Jelle, there probably needs to be one.