Radiance

About Radiance

Radiance is intended to aid lighting designers and architects by predicting the light levels and appearance of a space prior to construction. The package includes programs for modeling and translating scene geometry, luminaire data and material properties, all of which are needed as input to the simulation. The lighting simulation itself uses ray tracing techniques to compute radiance values (ie. the quantity of light passing through a specific point in a specific direction), which are typically arranged to form a photographic quality image. The resulting image may be analyzed, displayed and manipulated within the package, and converted to other popular image file formats for export to other packages, facilitating the production of hard copy output. The major portion of the Radiance package, and the part that is of chief interest to users, is the lighting simulation engine that calculates light levels and renders images.