Text formatting

Special formatting has been employed throughout the text to identify Radiance programs, example files included with the tutorial and commands for performing the simulations.

Radiance programs: Radiance programs can be identified in the text by italicized font. For example, rfluxmtx refers to the Radiance program rfluxmtx, named rfluxmtx.exe in Windows, inside the bin sub-directory of the Radiance installation directory. With the exception of genBSDF, all the Radiance programs featured in this tutorial are named in lower-case format on Unix-like systems. The command-line interface in Windows® based systems is not case sensitive.

Example files: The example files are identified in the text by Comic Sans MS font. The path-names of files are relative to a root directory called room. For example, objects/Glazing.radrefers to the file Glazing.rad inside the directory room/objects.

Radiance and other command-line syntax: Command-line syntax, whether expressed separately as a complete command or excerpted in-line in the text, is highlighted and expressed in monospaced font. Unless two lines are separated by whitespace, the line-breaks present in commands should be ignored. For example, the following lines are two separate commands:

gensky 3 20 10:30EDT -m 75 -o 73.96 -a 40.78 > skies/NYC_CIE.sky

genskyvec -m 1 < skies/NYC_CIE.sky> skyVectors/NYC_CIE.vec

On the other hand, the lines below are for a single command and should be typed as such in the terminal (or MS DOS) window.

rfluxmtx -ffc -v -n 8 -x 400 -y 222 -ld- -c 9 -ab 12 -ad 50000 -lw 1e-5 -o matrices/dc/hdr/%03d.hdr - skyDomes/skyglow.rad -i roomDC.oct < matrices/dc/viewRays.txt

While majority of the syntax used in this document is specific to Radiance, there are some instances where external OS based commands are used as well. Radiance-based commands and syntax are mostly platform independent. All the OS based commands, unless mentioned otherwise, are discussed with regards to Mac OS and Unix-like systems.