[Radiance-general] Re: Radiance workshop, etc.

[Greg Ward]

Unfortunately, I couldn't read Martin's posting, as it came out as an 
encoded sequence that my mailer couldn't decypher.  Folks, if you're 
sending text, see if you can use ASCII.  It's a good standard, and it's 
been around for some time.  My mailer figures out most things, but it's 
not 100% reliable.

I'm gathering my notion of what was said by Carsten and Schorsch's 
responses...

>> rview version of rpiece
> would be a nice thing to have. Indeed, I already wrote something like
> this (although not based on rpiece, but generally on a separate 
> parallel
> processing library (PVM)). The problem is, however, that the succesive
> refining scheme of rview needs a lot of data shuffling when sending the
> output of different processes to the display, so the parallel rview 
> came
> out really slooooooow, which is why I abandoned it and do parallel
> processing only in rpict mode.

The new rholo program is runs like rview in parallel, as you can start 
as many processes as you have processors.  I never got around to making 
it work over a network, and I have doubts it would really pay off due 
to the latencies involved.  Carsten's statement would seem to confirm 
this.

>>> reliable smoothing functions
>> the smoothing option in e.g. gensurf (-s) works very well. I don't 
>> have
>> any experience in cases when polygon meshes are imported from CAD
>> programs, although I already thought about an independent smoothing
>> process which could be let loose on any given polygon set.
>> Question: does the smoothing generally get lost when importing stuff
>> from, say, Autocad ?
>
> Yes. That may eventually change once I have understood how
> gensurfs smoothing actually works (doesn't seem to bee too
> complicated, just that I didn't have the nerve to dig into
> the topic yet).

Gensurf will also take vertices from its standard input or a file and 
generate smoothed polygons, but the vertices have to be laid out on a 
grid.  (I added for the next release a feature to enable you to cut 
rough holes into gensurf meshes.)  If you have a triangle mesh and you 
know the vertex normals, you can use the tmesh2rad or mgf2rad 
converters to get these into smoothed triangles in Radiance.  The 
mgf2rad program will also smooth quadrilaterals, but it does so by 
breaking them into triangles.  The obj2rad program can also take 
smoothed surfaces in Alias/Wavefront format, so there really are many 
options for getting smoothed surfaces into Radiance.

-Greg