[Radiance-general] A modern comparison of Radiance and other rendering engines

[Dion Moult]

Good morning all,

Apologies if a thread like this already existed, but after searching the
archives I could not find it.

I am looking for a modern-day explanation as to what Radiance offers that other
popular rendering engines (Renderman, Cycles, V-Ray, etc) do not. These all seem
to use ray-tracing, solve the global illumination problem, use physical units
(albeit sometimes not very obviously, and sometimes require a conversion
factor), I see hints of illumination falsecolours out there, and can output
unclipped HDRIs as final results... as you can see, at first glance to an
inexperienced person it really does seem that these other rendering engines are
indeed also physically based and can also give the same scientifically accurate
output that Radiance can (also perhaps not as easily parsable as Radiance
results). (Assuming that the user doesn't purposely use biased rendering
techniques)

There seem to be features such as human eye image calibration, or falsecolours
that are rarer to be found in other engines, but slowly I am seeing mentions of
these features emerging.

I also stumbled upon this comparison website:

https://www.janwalter.org/RadianceVsYouNameIt/radiance_vs_younameit.html

In that website, it is not obvious how the material and light properties were
converted for each engine, but in short, the graphical outputs look the same.

I hope that someone on this list can help explain to me in simpler terms what I
am overlooking :)

-- 
Dion Moult
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