Miscellaneous programs

• xform: is a program meant for transforming Radiance scene descriptions. When used without any transformation options, xform can be used to simply include a certain Radiance definition into the scene. It can also be used to replace the material definitions of surfaces in the scene with a different material.

• oconv: creates an octree from the given scene files. Creating an octree is the preliminary step for most simulations in this tutorial. More details on the relevance of octrees in Radiance can be found in (Ward 1994).

• cnt: is an index counter that is useful in iterating or counting through a specified number of inputs.

• rcalc: is a record calculator (LBNL 2017a). It is extremely versatile and can be used for calculations that range from simple arithmetic to complex ones such as mapping an image of the sky to a cylindrical surface (Jacobs 2014). In this tutorial rcalc is used in the Five Phase Method for calculating the position of solar-discs as per the chosen number of Reinhart sky-subdivisions.

• getbbox: computes the extents of the physical geometry present in a Radiance scene.

• objview: can be used to interactively view a Radiance scene.

• genBSDF: is a program to create Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSDF) descriptions of Radiance definitions. For example, it can convert a venetian blind defined in terms of Radiance polygon primitives into an equivalent BSDF. More details about genBSDF can be found in its tutorial (McNeil 2015).

• BSDF Viewer: is a program that can interactively visualize BSDF datasets. BSDF viewer is not a part of the standard Radiance distribution and needs to be downloaded separately (LBNL 2013).