Customer Reviews

Rendering with Radiance (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

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The following review of "Rendering with Radiance" was published in the November 1998 issue of "Lighting Design + Application" magazine. It has been posted to AMAZON.COM by the author.

Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., LC byHeart Consultants Limited 620 Ballantree Road West Vancouver, BC Canada V7S 1W3 e-mail: byheart@acm.org

Lighting Design + Application contact:

Mark Newman, Editor Lighting Design + Application Illuminating Engineering Society of North America 120 Wall Street, 17th Floor New York, NY 10005 Tel: (212) 248-5000

Rendering with Radiance Greg Ward Larson and Rob Shakespeare ISBN 1-55860-499-5, Hard Cover 664 pages; 1998; Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Many LD+A readers know Radiance as a lighting design and analysis program that was developed by Greg Ward (Larson) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those who have investigated Radiance know that it is freely available, but usable only if you have a UNIX workstation and the patience to master more than 50 software tools. In ten years, it has attracted a coterie of fewer than 400 dedicated users.

Rendering with Radiance will undoubtedly change this. Originally conceived as a UNIX-style technical manual, the book is much more. It offers several tutorials, numerous application examples, and detailed discussions of the program's underlying mathematical algorithms. The accompanying CD-ROM includes example images, Radiance models and material libraries, reference manuals, and fully commented C source code for Radiance 3.1.

Despite first impressions, this book is not about computer graphics. The Radiance Lighting Simulation and Rendering System was created for advanced lighting designers and academic researchers, and more than half of the book is devoted to applying Radiance to real-world lighting problems. Ward Larson, Shakespeare and three contributing experts discuss luminaire modeling and lighting analysis, daylight simulation, animation, roadway lighting, theatre lighting, and exterior lighting. Even if you have committed yourself to using architectural visualization programs such as Lightscape and RadioRay, you will find an abundance of useful information in this book.

Radiance is the only software program that faithfully models the physical behavior of light, especially specular and semispecular reflections. It has a steep learning curve, but the quality of the architectural renderings it produces is unequalled by any commercial product. With Rendering with Radiance, we now have a user's manual that fully complements the capabilities of its namesake.

This truly is a remarkable book. Unlike most computer graphics texts, it presents lengthy discussions of IES photometric data files, luminance meters and spectrophotometers, the CIE overcast sky model, roadway light metrics, veiling luminance, spectral transmission data, and much more. The major algorithms used by Radiance are fully documented, including discussions of their limitations. There is more information in this book on lighting software use and design than can be found in all other books combined.

The major disadvantage of Radiance is that it was developed for UNIX workstations. In the past, this restricted the use of the program (really a set of UNIX tools) mostly to academic researchers. However, the freely-available and popular UNIX clone Linux now allows Radiance to be run with few difficulties on Windows and Macintosh computers.

Back by popular demand, Rendering with Radiance, Revised Edition is now available at a lower price. The authors have retained the publishing rights from Morgan Kaufman and are now self-publishing the book. It should be available through Amazon.com and others shortly. The new ISBN is 0-9745381-0-8. The revised edition corrects some typos, and eliminates the color plates and CD-ROM.

I bought this book, but there are no colour pics, only poor quality black and white images ( page 328 onwards ) All the other books i have seen have colour pics - why not this one ? - this is a rip off. And Amazon has no where to complain about this ... Greg, please help !

As a contributor to the text, I am a bit biased, but I do think you will find the book's numerous chapters very helpful for folks of a wide range of skill levels. It is a great resource guide, reference book and tutorial. It includes the Radiance executables for a few Unix platforms on the CD-ROM! These alone will save you an hour or two. The book is well worth the money, but don't take my word for it.

The Rendering with Radiance...Revised Edition ISBN is 0-9745381-0-8