[Radiance-general] Re: how i can work with archicad and radiance ?

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi,

I've looked at my old projects... the one I exported from Archicad
was written as 3ds, then converted to mgf and from there to rad. As
you get triangles with 3ds, and as Archicad produces a lot of
geometry (that's because it follows an approach using building
elements, which are predefined with all details and then modified).
I got quite large scene files (my geometry in radiance format .rad
took about 50MB). I am not sure if the detail settings you can do
in Archicad just change the view or also the geometry that is
exported. You might try to import your 3ds into a pure modeller
and reduce details here (I love to use formZ for radiance scenes,
you can even export dxf then and import your simplified scene
as dxf than with dxf2rad).

As you see, you must decide wether you want to do some extra
work and get some "optimized" model into radiance, e.g. if you will
do a lot of rendering later, or if you simply want some nice images
and use the "brute force" method simply importing the geometry
from Archicad, and using a fast machine with lots of memory... I
always do some work on geometry before I import into radiance
just because I have a 128MB laptop here, so maybe all this is
no problem for you.

CU, Lars.