This is a short write up on how to get the real-life light renderer Radiance to work in a windows environment (only tested with XP).

Radiance is developed for the unix platform, luckily some nice people have ported it to various other platforms. Two options are available in order to run radiance it under windows.

• CygWin with the unix binaries
• Use the mingw win32 compiled binaries

The first options allow you to have the same features as unix users, but you will have to deal with the trouble of installing and configuring cygwin. The second options requires nothing but downloading the binaries, very easy, so that is what I have done. Unfortunately you won't have any of the viewing tools this way, so no rview or xview to view your scene or output, you will have to render it in order to see the result.

In order to get started we need the radiance binaries which can be downloaded from Radiance Tools or from this direct link: Mingw Radiance 3R8

http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/refer/tutorial.html