The RADIANCE Lighting Simulation and Rendering System

ABSTRACT

1. Introduction

2. System Design Goals

2.1 Ensure Accurate Calculation of Luminance

2.2 Model Both Electric Light and Daylight

2.3 Support a Variety of Reflectance Models

2.4 Support Complicated Geometry

2.5 Take Unmodified Input from CAD Systems

3. Approach

3.1 Hybrid Deterministic/Stochastic Ray Tracing

3.2 Cached Indirect Irradiances for Diffuse Interreflection

3.3 Adaptive Sampling of Light Sources

3.4 Automatic Preprocessing of "Virtual" Light Sources

3.5 User-directed Preprocessing of "Secondary" Sources

3.6 Hierarchical Octrees for Spatial Subdivision

3.7 Patterns and Textures

3.8 Parallel Processing

3.9 Animation

3.10 Implementation Issues

4. Applications and Results

4.1 Electric Lighting

4.2 Daylighting

5. Conclusion

6. Acknowledgements

7. Software Availability

Radiance is available by anonymous ftp from two official sites:

• hobbes.lbl.gov (128.3.12.38) Berkeley, California
• nestor.epfl.ch (128.178.139.3) Lausanne, Switzerland

For convenience, Radiance 2.4 has been included on the CD-ROM version of the 1994 Siggraph proceedings.

From Mosaic, try the following URL: file://hobbes.lbl.gov/www/radiance/radiance.html

8. Appendix