Radiance 4.1

Radiance is a highly accurate ray-tracing software system for UNIX computers that is licensed at no cost to users for non-commercial use; commercial use licenses including distribution rights are available for a fee.

Radiance is a suite of programs for the analysis and visualization of lighting in design.

Input files specify the scene geometry, materials, luminaires,time, date and sky conditions (for daylight calculations). Calculated values include spectral radiance (ie. luminance color), glare indices and irradiance (illuminance color). Simulation results may be displayed as color images, numerical values and contour plots.

The primary advantage of Radiance over simpler lighting calculation and rendering tools is that there are no limitations on the geometry or the materials that may be simulated. Radiance is used by architects and engineers to predict illumination, visual quality and appearance of innovative design spaces, and by researchers to evaluate new lighting and daylighting technologies.

NOTE: Radiance is licensed and provided under the terms of the Radiance OpenSource License Agreement. Radiance is free for non-commercial use.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Changed ranimate behavior so remote login under a different user doesn't necessarily require the presence of the originating user's home directory.
· Changed standard transmission function normalization back to what it was in version 3.5, following recommendation of David Geisler-Moroder, who pointed out that the revised BTDF increased too much at grazing.
· Changed rad behavior with -N >1 on single view to call rpiece.
· Updated SCons build system for MINGW compilation, thanks to Christian Kohler.
· Added -u option to rlam for unbuffered output.
· Modified dctimestep to accept sky vector and daylight coefficient matrix or list of images to sum together, as suggested by Andy McNeil.
· Created genBSDF script to generate BSDF in Windows XML format.
· Modified mkillum to accept detailed geometry from BSDF XML files.
· Altered obj2rad to ignore zero normals (thanks to Jack de Valpine for suggestions and help).
· Fixed bug in genklemsamp that caused non-uniform sampling over surfaces.
· Fixed bugs in rhoptim...