rshow - an interactive previewer for the Radiance system

rshow is an interactive previewer for the Radiance synthetic image system. It uses hardware-accelerated graphics-cards to render a scene with Open-GL, rather than the raytracing of rpict and rvu. Its primary use is to fine-tune camera positions, check geometry, plan for rendering by raytracing and visualise results.
rshow has been written by Peter Apian-Bennewitz, first at Fraunhofer ISE in 1993, then, after 1999, at pab-opto. In 2004 it was brought up to the then current Radiance standard.
It had been released as publicly available software, distributed as binary code free of charge, copyrighted by the author and useable by anyone for non-commercial and commercial work.

Example screen-dumps:

mechanical part screen dump on an SGI Onyx workstation	Freiburg downtown illumination levels on horizontal surface, displayed as false-colour along vertically cutting planes

Advantages (see also publications below):

• compatibility with Radiance: reads Radiance scene description (octree) using the original Radiance code.
• interactivity: fine tuning of view parameters (position,direction,view angles) is much faster and elegant than rvu
• displays additional data in-scene, e.g. irradiance levels, BSDF, etc
• mapping of pictures to polygons (texturing)
• camera path for animation

situation in 2022:

• If you can contribute to funding the rewrite, I'd much appreciate to hear from you.
• July 2022: Rewriting the GUI with GTK3 seems a workable solution to restart rshow. It must also been adjusted for changes in the Radiance core code since 2015.
• May 2020: Due to incompatible changes in the Tcl/Tk libs, version 8.6 , it no longer compiles or runs. Sadly, unless I encounter a good reason to use it myself again, or someone funds further development, the rshow release 0.73c of 2015 will remain the last one.

• Radiance primitive and modifier support:
  • glass, trans, mist, BRDF materials and antimatter are displayed as white, stippled primitives
  • mixfunc support: follows first modifier
  • texture support (see below)
  • supports multiple windows
• rendering interface:
  • popup-menu with subset of Radiance core parameters
  • 'rvu' style rendering to rshow window
  • point-n-clic pop-up with material/primitive parameters
  • generation of rtrace grid for polygonal surfaces
  • irradiance calculations above/below polygonal surfaces
  • generation of colorpict coordinate mapping for polygonal surfaces
  • NOTE: internal irradiance calculations are not trustworthy. Please use external calls to rtrace for reliable data. Internal calcs don't clear the internal ambient values when ambient parameters are changed.

Please read the disclaimer below before downloading. Downloading the software indicates your acceptance of the disclaimer.
Beta-versions of rshow are publicly available free of charge:

To install rshow on your machine follow these steps:

1. select a distribution file for downloading from the table below. For Netscape/Mozilla, press right mouse button over rshow.XXX.tar.gz file and choose 'save to file'
2. unpack the distribution files with
   tar xfv rshow.XXX.tar.gz
   
3. Depending on our system, you may need to install other libraries, as mentioned below.
4. The executable rshow is located in bin, auxiliary files are in the lib subdirectory.
   Set the environment variable RSHOW_PATH to point to the absolute path of the lib subdirectory, like:
   RSHOW_PATH=/usr/local/rshow/lib; export RSHOW_PATH
5. You may have to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to your tcl/tk library if it's not installed in a standard place. Update Oct 2014: tcl/tk shared libs are no longer needed.
6. You're all set and ready to go. Choose an octree and start rshow xyz.oct
   
7. Notes: Beta releases are no longer fitted with a best-before-date.
8. list of commandline options, technical notes, small FAQ

• Open-GL's display list memory usage is high
• still doesn't handle meshes
• many parameters have no command line equivalent, there's no .rshow.rc config file
  See my postings to the Radiance dev list about X resource handling.
• instances with non-plastic/metal material are not drawn in glow/light/mist mode
• only the first modifier is displayed in tcl pop-up (see long discussion in Radiance mailing list about alias)
• back-for movement in non-fix-point-mode has wrong X orientation after leaving fix-point-mode. Workaround: click again with middle mouse
• ... various smaller things (around 40 on my to-do list)

0.73c - 5.1.2015

• added display of BSDF data, mountain/PG-II style

0.73 - 15.10.2014, new compile

• adaptions to current Radiance 4.2 release
• removed Tcl/Tk shared libs, since these don't work on 64bit Debian releases (and probably others)
• rshow is still a 32bit executable, you'll need the 32bit compatibility libs on a 64bit system. Apart from this, it should run fine on a 64bit Linux system.

0.72e - 19.12.2007, new compile

• minor fixes

0.72d - 12.4.2005, bug fixes

• LZW compression for TIFF screen dumps is put back in, since the patent by Unisys had expired
• now supports writing of PNG format for screen dumps, - conclusively a shared lib for PNG is now required at runtime
  PNG is much smaller than an LZW compressed TIFF file, so it seemed worth adding PNG
• tar file name doesn't include kernel version any more, since that is fairly unrelated to our Open-GL and X11 stuff
• reversed back-fore mouse movement again

0.72c - 5.2.2005, bug fixes

• fixed bug in sharing of Open-GL display lists, so multiple managed windows work again
• fixed minor bug in cmdline parsing that could lead to a segfault
• unmanaged windows now show other viewer positions as default

0.72b - 9.1.2005, bug fixes

• fixed bug in instance display ('ghost' instances were displayed without the transformation)
  this was a side effect of the shadow cache introduced with Radiance R6
• added backface cull in tcl popup, cleaned up backface culling Open-Gl code
• back-fore movement with ctrl-middle-button now scales with distance to fix point
• added proper handling of cmdline window size at Tk/togl startup
• setting Open-GL front/back clipping from Radiance view file is removed until fixed properly
• dielectric, interface and mirror materials are now displayed with stipple pattern like glass

0.72a - 29.11.2004, updated libs

• initial port to Radiance R3.6a, Togl 1.6, Tcl/Tk 8.4 and gcc 3.3.1
• hierarchical alias, mesh and texture handling still missing
• reversed back-fore movement with ctrl-middle-button (to be compatible with others)

0.71b, 15.2.2003

• polygon storage and handling got more efficient
• raytracing is now triggered by F9
• added manual culling (cmdline -qc)
• added wire-frame display of Radiance's bounding cube of instances (shortcut F4, so fast display of many instances is F2, F4)
• filenames in tgz package got a rshow/ prefix
• changed and new tiff tags for TIFF screen dump: TIFFTAG_DOCUMENTNAME is now the filename, TIFFTAG_IMAGEDESCRIPTION contains view specs, TIFFTAG_HOSTCOMPUTER is set to hostname

0.71a, 13.1.2003

• new navigation: middle mouse button moves left/right-up/down, ctrl-middle-button moves back-fore . In fix-point mode (click on 'fix'), middle button rotates camera around fix-point
• fixed long standing bug in scene redrawing after window resizing. Fixes missing redraw after window exposure too: So it refreshes on X11 servers without backing store, if an obscured part of the window gets exposed. To avoid long redrawing times for complex scenery, enable backing store (e.g. for users of XFree 4.x : xinit -- +bs).
• removed LZW support in TIFF dump, due to patent issues regarding LZW. This should avoid core- instead of TIFF-dumps on some Linux distributions. TIFF screen dump is now written uncompressed, please check other graphic packages (e.g. netppmplus) for conversion.
• fixed missing reading of PLASTIC2/METAL2 surfaces
• streamlined internal routines

0.70h, 27.10.2002

• reduced Open-GL parameters to run on N-Vidia accelerated X-servers (which have no stencil bitplanes)

0.70g, 30.6.2002

• fixed long standing bug with 'disc' display
• use fore/aft clipping planes given in view file. resetting views (view all button) resets clipping planes,
  currently w/x GUI

0.70f, 11.12.2001

• recompiled on Slackware 8.0

0.70e, 18.6.2001

• compiled on SUSE7.2 (X11,GLX,GL,TCL/TK as on the 7.2 CDs)

0.70e, 19.5.2001

• recompiled on IRIX 5.3, added minimal shared lib version for Linux

0.70e, 5.3.2001

• recompiled Linux2.2 and IRIX64 with new best-before date (end of 2005) and current tcl/tk libs for Linux
• re-added -oc option (due to display lists, the Xserver may become quite large)

0.70e, 2.3.2000

• raytracing (picking and rvu-style rendering) now honours the same front clipping plane as the hardware rendering
• names for tar files now include operating system version (whow! - )

0.70d, 15.2.2000

• now honours vs, vl commandline options (currently w/x GUI)
• writing of view parameters now includes: vs, vl, vo options
  Note1: vo is now set to the front clipping plane used in rshow
  Note2: reading vo is not yet supported and writing va is deemed not as useful as vo.
• name changed from rshow.new to rshow
• dump of coordinate cross position to stdout
• fixed bug in orientation for view direction parallel to z
• more intelligent resizing in file selection pop-up
• screen dump enhancements:
  • dump file now includes octree name, rshow version and view
  • pop-up is now triggered by 'Print' button
  • writes out Radiance or TIFF (thanks to Sam Leffler) formats
• best-before-date set to 31.12.2000

0.70c, 22.11.1999

• fixed bug leading to too bright lighting in scaled instances
• default light sources position changed

0.70b, 22.9.1999

• fixed bugs in cone orientation and display brightness

0.70, 1.9.1999 - first release after moving to pab-opto -

• fixed various memory bugs
• tested MESA Version 3 and Tcl/Tk 8.2.0

publications:

• "An integrated 3D approach for handling geometry and simulation data in planning process"
  PDF file, published at "Second European Conference on product and Process Modelling", BRE Watford UK, 19-21.10.1998

• "INTEGRAL VISUALISATION OF BUILDINGS AND SIMULATION DATA IN rshow"
  PDF file published at Building Simulation '1999, Kyoto, Japan, 13-15.9.1999

• "Studie zur Anwendung und Grenzen derzeitiger Programmtypen zur photo-realistischen Darstellung von Licht und Beleuchtung in der Architektur"
  published at Light+Building 2000, Frankfurt, Germany, 20-22.3.2000

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