[geeks] Lightscape

[Joshua D Boyd]

Autodesk makes a program called lightscape.  It is a "lighting"
designer.  It would take a file from Autocad, 3DS Studio (and in
versions more recent than I've used 3DS Max), and probably several other
programs, and let you light the scene.  It would then precompute a
radiosity solution, and say it back into the scene, either by lightmaps,
or by subdividing the geometry and storing the lighting results per
vertex.  The results from lightscape could easily be loaded into many
"VR" systems for exploring the results interactively (since the hardwork
was done once up front).  In particular, it could save all the needed
information into a VRML file, which then didn't require to great of a
computer to use.

Anyway, I was wondering if any one knows of any other products that will
save the radiosity solution in the same types of ways.  Ideally free,
for my purposes, but even non-free would be interesting and
informative.  Will the tools that come with BRL-CAD do this?  There are
lots of sites that vaguelly say there are packages that will precompute
and export the radiosity solution, but Lightscape is the only one I've
been able to find.

Lightscape delivered an amazing amount of visual bang, and I'm hoping to
be able to bring that bang back to my class projects, and hopefully do
it in such a way as to effect the way the class is taught.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd