RadDisplay

Radiance image viewer and analysis for architectural light study

RadDisplay has been developed by De Luminæ Lab to answer two basic needs:

Image viewing:
Radiance simulation tool allows users to produce highly realistic images which contain a lot of information concerning light. However, the image format is specific and information about lighting within the image cannot be easily studied without the use of Radiance. In that respect, we could only provide our clients images in "more classical" format and a textual analysis of them. 

In order to give clients the freedom to further investigate themselves the images resulting from image simulations, we developed a Radiance image viewer that does not require Radiance knowledge.
As Radiance is Unix based whereas most of our clients are using Windows, RadDisplay has been developed on these 2 platforms.

Image investigation and false colors: False coloring is in our view a very powerful tool to investigate images. It is also a fantastic communication tool for technical images such as Radiance images.
We think we developed within RadDisplay an easy and nice interface for false colors. You can set number of colors, precise limits between colors, etc.
We hope you'll like it. At least, we use it a lot!

In order to give back a little to the Radiance community which has been of invaluable help over the years of our Radiance use, we decided to release RadDisplay under GPL license so that anyone can freely use, distribute, and modify it.
So feel free to use, correct and improve it !

Requirements and installation

RadDisplay program can be installed in Unix/Linux based operating systems and in Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP.

Below are given requirements and installation information for both versions of program.

Installation from binaries (Windows only)
To install RadDisplay program follow next procedure:

1. Double-click on RadDisplay-1.0.Setup.exe file to start RadDisplay installation program.
2. Follow all steps in installation program.
3. Program icon will be added to Desktop and Start Menu. Program can be started with double-click on the icon.
4. Configuration files are put in installation directory in subdirectory raddisplay-conf.
5. To uninstall program use Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs utility or uninstall program from Start menu, RadDispaly submenu.

When program is installed no other programs or libraries are needed to run the program.

Notes: Radiance binaries for Windows operating system.
Three Radiance programs are needed for RadDisplay execution: ra_bmp, pextrem and pfilt. These executables are automatically installed in "Radiance" subdirectory. Radiance executable files used in RadDisplay distribution are compiled for Windows with mingw32 on 2005-10-07 by Francesco Anselmo, and they are available in MINGW Radiance distribution
RadDisplay tries to start default version of Radiance programs in your Windows OS, and if it doesn't exist the path to installed Radiance binaries is read from raddispaly.config file. If you want to use some other version of Radiance executables, install Radiance on Windows, and add its path to PATH environment variable or change the path in config file.

Installation from sources (Linux and Windows)
RadDisplay source code distribution can be installed on both Linux and Windows platforms. To install it follow the procedure below:

Before you can install RadDisplay, the complementary packages listed below (see requirements) need to be installed.

Linux OS

1. Open archive raddisplay-1.0.tar.gz
   tar xvzf raddisplay-1.0.tar.gz.
2. In directory raddisplay-1.0, log as a root user and execute command
   python ./setup.py install
3. Program will be installed in site-packages subdirectory in Python directory and it is available to all users with command raddisplay.
4. Configuration files are put in users home directory in subdirectory raddisplay-conf.
5. To uninstall the program you can use script uninstall.csh as root user. This will remove all RadDisplay files, and your config files won't be deleted.

Windows OS

1. Open archive raddisplay-1.0.zip with some of standard Window archive programs.
2. Open Command Prompt window (Start menu->Run, type cmd and press "OK"), position yourself in raddisplay-1.0 directory and run the command
   python ./setup.py install
3. Program will be installed in Lib/site-packages subdirectory in Python directory, and raddisplay script will be in Scripts subdirectory in Python directory.
   Create shortcut to raddisplay script, and use it to open the program (with python).
4. Configuration files are put in Python directory in subdirectory raddisplay-conf.

Requirements

To run RadDisplay installed from source code distribution next programs/libraries are required:

1. Python, version 2.4 or above;
2. wxPython, version 2.6.x or above;
3. Pyhon Imaging Library (PIL) version 1.1.6 or above;
4. NumPy Python module;
5. Numeric Python module on Linux;
6. Python for Windows extensions on Windows;
7. Radiance version 3.7.x or above for Linux version. On Windows few programs from MINGW Radiance distribution are installed with program.
8. To acheive faster results on image opening, the weave module should be installed.

The following software is recommended to achieve full potential of RadDisplay program:

wrjpgcom and rdjpgcom - two programs usually installed with JPEG libraries.