Radiance ‹ Graphics ‹ Art ‹ meridian.net.au
Related sites: Radiance official site
Architects and engineers use Radiance to predict illumination, visual quality, and appearance of innovative design spaces, and researchers evaluate new lighting and daylighting technologies.
More and more people around the world are using Radiance, because its optimised ray tracing and radiosity methods allow accurate simulation of lighting, which makes it perfect, even in non-architectural situations.
The gallery shows some pictures that I created using Radiance, during my last couple of years at university (1993–1994).
They are fairly simple, especialy when compared to what artists can achieve using today's technology, but it was fun learning about it.
Unfortunately, over time, I have lost the original high quality versions (a CD-ROM burner would have been handy), though recently I did find some decent resolution versions on an old floppy disk. The images in the gallery are based on these copies.
I rendered the original images at resolutions around 4,000 pixels in width. At that time, the Maths Department at the University of New England just purchased four DEC Alpha AXPs, so I was able to render a quater of the image on each system.
Rendering times varied, but on average, about 30 minutes was needed to render each image. I then scaled the images by a factor of 0.25 for anti-aliasing, and produced a final version of about 1,000 pixels wide.