About LESS.

This website has been moved to http://lessrt.org/

LESS is a ray-tracing based radiative transfer simulation model, which is mainly designed for radiometric simulation of forest canopies, but also can simulate other kinds of scenes (such as cities etc.). A possible advantage of LESS is that it can simulate relatively large areas with millions of single trees, thus we named it as Large-scale Emulation System for forest Simulation (LESS). Through parallel computing, LESS can run on high-performance computing clusters （e.g. > 1000 cores). It can also combine some common computers into a parallel computing cluster in a fast and simple way, which greatly increases the usability of LESS when we do not have access to high-performance clusters. LESS is developed with Java, Python and C++.

Software screen.

A simulated forest scene with hotspot effect.
(it contains more than 600000 individual trees.)

updates:

2017-3-27(version 1.1):

  • Unlimited band numbers.
  • Add bandwidth features for band definition
  • A new tool to define band number and bandwidth, especially for large number of bands.
  • A new tool to define instances of objects by poisson distributon and Polygons.
  • select optical properties from some predefined database.

2017-3-7:

fixed a bug for installer.