[Radiance-general] New installaation progress

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 16 Jan 2008, at 19:10, wjr wrote:

> Hi everyone, again
>
> OK, things are getting better, thanks to all of you.

Well, congratulations and welcome to the Radiance community.

> Recap: running Solaris10 on ultrasparcIII, Installed development  
> tools, ran ./makeall install, answered all questions, installed  
> into /opt/Radiance3.6a

3.6 is old! You should have downloaded 3.8 from the official site.
Doesn't matter to you at the moment but please remember to report
your version (and platform) if you have any troubles and want to ask
the mailing list.

>    and   /usr/local/bin........, verified that all files exist,  
> ( even read a few of the ReadMe files)

The Readme files are sources of wisdom! You should read them all!

> modified my path ( local.cshrc) to include $path:     set path =  
> (bin /usr/bin/ usr/ucb /etc /bin $path .)   Printed the reference  
> manuals and user guides and tried to make sense out of the  
> tutorials.  huh?!

Right path. The ultimate step is to buy the book 'Rendering with  
Radiance'.

> Now What????? What should I be looking for? What does Radiance look  
> like?

Read the README again, in particular the part that starts with:

     "The most important program to learn about if you are a
     new user ..."

Then read the man page for 'rad' (and every other Radiance
app you are going to use).

The basic idea is this:

First there is a lot of text files describing your scene geometry.
You convert these files to a scene file ("octree") with the command
'oconv'. Then you run 'rpict' (for images) or 'rtrace'/'rtcontrib'
with this scene as input to create your desired output.

You can find a few examples bundled with the source code in the
'obj' directory. Unfortunately they also contain a bit of shell
scripting which makes the whole think look more complicated than
it is.

The best (free) beginner tutorial IMO are Axel Jacobs' course
notes for his Radiance course:

http://luminance.londonmet.ac.uk/learnix/docs.shtml

Read those, follow the exercises and try to understand what's
going on in the example scenes.

> How do I begin? I'm used to using CAD programs with a user
> interface of some sort. I don't see one for Radiance.
> Maybe I missed something along the way.

The one and only interface for Radiance is the shell. Amen.

There are some interfaces/exporters/converters for CAD and
3D apps which will help you with creating the scene geometry
(I think Arris has been mentioned already).

Getting the materials and rendering parameters right, however,
is a source of endless frustration|joy [delete as appropriate].

> Please help, again.

Looking back at your earlier emails I get the impression that
you are more interested in pictures than lighting analysis.
See if you can find something about this (old) Arris to Radiance
converter to get your CAD into Radiance format. If that doesn't
work there is a script for Blender that should work on Solaris.
If you can create '.obj' files you can convert those to Radiance
with a tool included in the distribution.

That should keep you busy for a while.

Regards,
Thomas