arris2rad.txt

Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 09:24:28 +0100 (MET)
From: Jean Brange <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Radiance converter
To: Charles Ehrlich <chas>

Hi Chas,

The converter is called arris2rad (obvious no ?)

THis released has been designed on an ARRIS derivative that I develop here in
Europe, which is compatible with ARRIS 604, but I have tested it on ARRIS 70
and it works, It should also work on older release as 5.8 or 5.7, before I do
not know, I started working with ARRIS on 5.7.

There is a tar gziped file avaible on my web server.

http://aleph.afuu.fr/radiance/arris2rad.html

I join to this mail a message sent last week to an arris2rad user, solving some
little problems.

I think there will be an updtae in the following weeks.

Jean.


=======================
Hi Mark,

A few points,

The internal page man. errors are always, I do not know why... They happend
after I make the system call I think. But they do not break the system and
arris keeps on running fine.

I made a workshop yesterday about this interface and I notice a few important
things which lead to Radiance erors:


1 set the display format to to marks, 2 or 3 digits after comma. 3.123
no " or ' or M or mm or cm and no separators: 1,34.56

2 you must have the display format set before you make the call to ray;init ,
if not set the display format and call :ray;init again there is a file called
arriscol.mod which contains the translation of the current arris colors as
radiance plastics materials and this fiile is generated when you call
:ray;init. If the display format is with marks or separators, or the wrong
scale, this file will be full of radiance syntax errors...

3 you must load M&R and set the sun if you cannot, you must set by hand at
arris prompt,
ir_mstr=month number (integer)
ir_dstr=day number (integer)
rr_hstr=hour number (real)

If any of the above 3 points are wrong the Radiance process cannot execute.

4 a good thing should be to copy into jb.ray:ctm.arris into jb.ray:ctm.default

5 it happends that changes made on the database are not exported to the rad
files, in this case, you need to save the databse and re-export. I think it has
to do with date format I have to check, it works on my machine but on other
machine I encounter this problem, It me be connected with system laguages...

I will have a look at line 456 .

There is a file in jb.ray called tx.mn_ray , it should be called st.ray. Then
you can load it as user menu. It contains buttons to call the dialogs.

It seems that the RAY_ANI menu is missing ???

If you have it , when you draw a path, the path MUST be ended with F10, not
STOP, nor Ctrl-C nor ESC !!!

Another problem with RIs
------------------------
If you want to use Ris, you should first take a new layer named as the RI.
Switch all other layers off, place the RI on A(0,0,0), freeze it, check the
material settings with RAY_SET. the RI should not contain color 'none' objects.
Then you export it using the RAY_IO export button. At that moment in the
radiance working directory you will have a riname.rad file where riname is the
name of the RI.

the best is to do the following:
if radaince is installed in /usr/local/ray
setenv PATH /usr/local/ray/bin:$PATH
setenv RAYPATH .:/usr/local/ray/lib
oconv -f *.mod riname.rad > lib/riname.oct

This will produce a frozen octree of the RI and palce it in the lib subdir orf
the radaince working directory.

I will produce an update for this end of next week, stay tuned


70 compatibility:
-----------------
you must rename the ctm.* files to *.ctm, sm.ray to ray.sm, ml.ray to ray.ml
you must mnar x ray.ml, rename md.* to *.md, mnar r ray.ml *.md
this should be enough.

Conventions:
------------
Radiance Repository: where Radiance is installed (i. e. /usr/local/ray )
Radiance Working Directory: where arris2rad will place the files it needs and
compute the pictures (i. e. usr:rad )