[Radiance-general] Re : Applying materials & non-orthagonal surfaces

[Ole Lemming]

Hello Mark and all

You can use barycentric coordinates on triangular polygons to handle the
normals and other info. I use this in ConRad to preserve the uv info from
3ds files and to allow for smoothing, by interpolating the 3 normals. Both
needs a special cal file.
(The smoothing is not available to the public yet).
With this method it should be possible to do, what you're looking for.

Kind Regards
Ole Lemming
www.openentry.dk


> I recently posted a question regarding perforated
> metal.  The material worked great, but I had to do a
> lot of tedious manual labor getting it to work right
> on a 3D arch due to the changes in surface normal of
> each section of the arch.
>
> So, I've been wondering if there is a better way to
> handle adding orientation specific materials to mesh
> geometry.  (practically all the "advanced" materials
> in radiance seem to be orientation specific)  So, is
> there a tool that will facilitate this process?
> Seems like it would need to read a rad file,
> calculate the surface normals for the polygons, and
> then write out a corresponding material file &
> possibly new rad file to go with the material file.
> My guess is that's how it would need to work.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks!  Mark