Perad is an interface for the rendering program Radiance written at the Chair for Architecture & CAAD, by Daniel von Lucius. It is a stand-alone program.
If you want to run Perad without exporting a model from MicroStation, you should start it from the unix shell.
In the shell, go to the directory of your radiance files. eg:
cd /homes10/spaceXXX/node5/filename_rad
To start Perad with the model loaded in it, type:
perad -f projectname.prj
It is essential to have a view defined when you want to render, therefore, it is good to start the whole process by defining a viewpoint. There are no viewpoints defined for models exported from MicroStation. For this, you have to go to the Views component first.
Another way of navigating is by using these keys:
The left group of keys is used to rotate the camera around the eye point in the respective direction.
The right group of keys is used to shift the camera perpendicular to the axis between the eye point and the target point in the respective direction.
Get as button is used to create a new view. The name of the view should be typed in the text field next to this button before pressing this button.
The views are listed in the middle part of this panel. CameraName is the name of the view given by the user. The set button displays this view in the main display area of the window. The delete button deletes the view. The get button saves the current view displayed in the main display area of the window into the specified view. If you use get, the old view is overwritten by the new one.
The Proportions slider changes the proportions of the main display area. The rendered image of a view will have the proportions of the main display area.
The Zoom slider decreases (zoom in) or increases (zoom out) the portion of the model displayed in a view.
The Mov_speed slider decreases or increases the speed of camera movement.
The Rot_speed slider decreases or increases the speed of camera rotation.
In Perad, next to each material, there's an edit button to edit its properties. The options for each material are different.
Currently, Perad supports five materials:
In the HeaderInfo section, you can rename the material by typing in the text field under the identifier label.
The lowest part has two sections; where you can delete the current material that is displayed in the editor section, and where you can create new materials. There is a selection menu where you will find all the supported materials. After you make your selection, you can press the new button to create a new material.
The interface includes some predefined Sky Conditions which are reflected in the background color of the main display area.
The position of the sun can be adjusted interactively or by selecting one of the predefined positions.
The Altitude slider changes the altitude of the sun.
The Azimuth slider changes the azimuth angle of the sun.
Next to each object is a selection menu with the materials defined inside the project. You can select the material that you want to assign to this object, and the object will be displayed with its new material in the main display section of the window.
You cannot edit or add objects in Perad. If you want to change the geometry, you need to re-export the model.
The Quality Manager section contains options to control the quality and resolution of the renderings. Low quality renderings do not give very good results, but the computation time is very short. High quality renderings take longer to compute.
The Preview & Render section has options to render and preview. The preview button saves the project and starts the radiance preview window. The render button saves the project and renders the view selected in a seperate process. This process runs independent of the interface, even if the user logs out of the machine. The result of this process is an image with .pic extension, a special Radiance format. The selection menu displays a list of the saved views to select for rendering. If there is no view selected, rendering is not possible.
In the Convert & ViewTiff section, there is a slider to change the exposure value (lightness, darkness) of the image. The image can be selected from the selection menu, and either only converted to tiff format, or converted and opened in xv. When the image is opened in xv, it can be saved as gif or jpg to upload to the Web.
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