[Radiance-general] Basic ray-tracing

[KENTRIDGE R.W.]

Dear Phillipe,

PBRT, the software and the book, are a great way of learning how raytracers work and are relatively straightforward to modify (I'm a fairly experienced but self-taught C and C++ programmer and I could manage to add some features relevant to vision science, which is what I do for a living). Luxrender is a fork of PBRT (both are open source, as is RADIANCE) but luxrender has some more advanced features (especially in terms of volume properties). If you start with PBRT then it is a relatively painless move to luxrender (which integrates really well with a variety of modelling systems). I started with RADIANCE though, but mainly as a user rather than a programmer.

I still wish RADIANCE had a sophisticated volume system but I guess it is too far away from its primary purpose - there are a lot of people in vision science who use RADIANCE who'd use it! 

cheers,

Bob Kentridge
Dept.of Psychology, University of Durham, UK


________________________________________
From: Rob Guglielmetti [rob.guglielmetti at gmail.com]
Sent: 05 January 2013 19:41
To: Radiance general discussion
Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] Basic ray-tracing

Yeah, what Greg said. PBRT is actually companion software to the excellent text, also advertised at that site. Here's the Amazonian scoop:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0123750792?ie=UTF8&tag=pharr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0123750792

- Rob


On Jan 5, 2013, at 11:37 AM, Greg Ward <gregoryjward at gmail.com> wrote:

> PBRT is a good alternative:
>
>       http://www.pbrt.org/
>
> -Greg
>
>> From: Philippe de Rochambeau <phiroc at free.fr>
>> Date: January 5, 2013 6:44:20 AM PST
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is Radiance a good environment to learn basic ray-tracing?
>>
>> I have looked at some of the tutorials online, but they seem to take it for granted that the reader is a lighting specialist or already has a ray-tracing background.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Philippe
>>
>
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