Posted by CJ Shumate on January 16, 2000 at 22:31:51:In Reply to: Re: Radiance Environment Mapping posted by LIN on January 11, 2000 at 09:01:11:
Hello Lin,
Radiance does allow for a great deal creativity, and being free makes it certainly affordable. It is, however, not the easiest piece of software to make friends with as it is UNIX-based and therefore has no GUI (graphic user interface) to speak of. But if you were a big fan of the original Zork series, perhaps this will not bother you. It seems that you have a good software background, so perhaps the UNIX part won't be so challenging, as long as you can obtain access to a UNIX-capable machine.
Of course, the easiest way to get Radiance renderings is to use RenderCity rendering service provided by Artifice. This is a free service that uses advanced automatic scripting to produce some truly beautiful renderings, all without the user needing to know a ounce of UNIX. But if you would rather do the renderings on your own and using your own hardware, there are many documents online that can help you learn to render with Radiance, not to mention a book called "Rendering with Radiance" written by the author of the software. The best method is just to plunge in and experiment with Radiance. The more comfortable you get, the more interesting experiments you can do. Once you learn the basics, the rest is fairly easy. I had become comfortable enough with UNIX and Radiance to experiment with the environment-mapping and other such things.
CJ