[Radiance-general] example of a street

[Georg Mischler]

Jan Hollan wrote:

> I began to learn Radiance today in order to be able to compute simple
> outdoor-lighting scenes, but did not succeed much with this powerful
> engine.
>
> Please, could anybody give me an example of an input to give to rad? I
> mean, e.g, a row of ten luminaires with a given ies photometric data
> (<name>.ies or <name>.dat and <name>.rad, I've them for some producers)
> and 7 klm bulbs, 10 m above the asphalt road (7 m wide), 3 m from its
> axis, 50 m apart.
>
> Moreover, I need not only a view, but average luminance of the road and
> ``uniformity ratios'' as well, from the view of a driver (1 m above the
> road, 1 m from its axis). (I see, Chapter 7 of Rendering with Radiance
> would say it, but it is not on-line and I've not the printed copy.)
>
> dark and peaceful skies,
> Jenik Hollan
>
> PS.
>  As an advocate of prevention of light pollution
> (http://www.astro.cz/darksky is a hint, most my texts are just in Czech
> however), I need to be able to compute the same things as lighting
> professionals, but with a free software, of course.


There are many definitions of free software.

If your concern is just to avoid the costs, and if your work is
about research and education, then you could get an educational
license of Rayfront, which would make the answer to most of the
above questions much simpler. You would still need some CAD
software to build your geometry model, but there are low cost
solutions to that as well. You can then calculate the required
average values and other ratios with a spreadsheat from the
numerical output. Contact me directly if you're interested.

Other than that, really answering your questions would require
a repetition of almost all of "the book" (or one of the manuals
for Radiance). There are no simple recipes for this kind of tasks
if you only have the bare Radiance engine at your hands. Radiance
is an open toolkit, whch requires you to supply some of the logic
by yourself, unless you are using a more abstract toolkit.

Your question is a bit of the "tell me everything" type.
You will have to study the documentation in any case, even if
you use one of the user interfaces available. And I really
recommend to get a copy of the book, just for the understanding
of what you're dealing with.

Maybe this is not the answer you hoped for...


Regards

-schorsch

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch.com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/