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

[Roland Schregle]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 14:44:09 +0100, Germán Molina Larrain  
<germolinal at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I agree with Lars in everything, but I also want to add some things:
>
>    1. I believe that, for scientific use of daylight simulations, you  
> need extensive numerical validation. Some renders are not focused on  
> that,

Numeric output is indeed a rare feature of commercial renderers, coupled  
with the UNIX-y way of processing it in pipes by chaining modules. And  
exactly this modular nature distinguishes RADIANCE, as it is really a  
suite of independent tools rather than one monolithic chunk of software;  
the charm/challenge lies in putting it all together for the task at hand.  
By contrast, modular commercial renderers use plug-ins, which generally  
cannot be used independently. You can of course argue that such software  
is better integrated than RADIANCE, and that's a definite plus in some  
application contexts.

A final point that hasn't been brought up is portability. Commercial  
software may be portable to some degree but is generally optimised for its  
target platform -- usually Windows. RADIANCE's code, by contrast, uses  
lowest-common-denominator functionality which you'll find on even the most  
rudimentary platform. While this precludes the use of more modern  
programming paradigms (yeah, I've b*tched about the lack of OOP), it also  
ensures it will probably run unmodified on even the most basic or arcane  
UNIX-y thing, should you choose to do so. I used to compile RADIANCE on  
SunOS, IRIX and HP-UX before I even got my first Linux box, and it'll  
probably still compile there today, however useful/less that may be. This  
may be a moot point to those who've never seen the code, but it reinforces  
Greg's argument for constancy as opposed to radical changes on each  
release of a commercial package.

My 2¢ worth...

--Roland