Radiance (software)
| Developer(s) | Greg Ward |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1985 |
| Stable release | 4.2.2 (2014-11-12) |
| Preview release | Non |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix, Linux, OS X, Windows |
| License | Project-specific open source |
| Website | http://www.radiance-online.org |
| Filename extension | .pic, .hdr, .rgbe, .xyze |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | image/vnd.radiance |
| Developed by | Randolph Fritz, Greg Ward |
| Initial release | 4 March 2009 |
| Type of format | Image file formats |
| Standard | http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/refer/filefmts.pdf |
| Open format? | open source |
| Website | http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/ |
Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulation originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels. It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure. It pioneered the concept of high dynamic range imaging, where light levels are (theoretically) open-ended values instead of a decimal proportion of a maximum (e.g. 0.0 to 1.0) or integer fraction of a maximum (0 to 255 / 255). It also implements global illumination using the Monte Carlo method to sample light falling on a point.
Greg Ward started developing Radiance in 1985 while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The source code was distributed under a license forbidding further redistribution. In January 2002 Radiance 3.4 was relicensed under a less restrictive license.
One study found Radiance to be the most generally useful software package for architectural lighting simulation. The study also noted that Radiance often serves as the underlying simulation engine for many other packages.
Radiance defined an image format for storing HDR images, now described as RGBE image format. Since it was the first (and for a long time the only) HDR image format, this format is supported by many other software packages.
The file starts with the signature '#?RADIANCE' and then several lines listing the commands used to generate the image. This information allows the renderer rpict to continue a partially completed render (either manually, or using the rad front-end). There are also key=value declarations, including the line 'FORMAT=32-bit_rle_rgbe'.
After this is a blank line signifying the end of the header. A single line describes the resolution and pixel order. As produced by the Radiance tools this always takes the form of '-Y height +X width'. After this line follows the binary pixel data.
Radiance calculates light values as floating point triplets, one each for red, green and blue. But storing a full double precision float for each channel (8 bytes × 3 = 24 bytes) is a burden even for modern systems. Two stages are used to compress the image data. The first scales the three floating point values to share a common 8-bit exponent, taken from the brightest of the three. Each value is then truncated to an 8-bit mantissa (fractional part). The result is four bytes, 32 bits, for each pixel. This results in a 6:1 compression, at the expense of reduced colour fidelity.
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