[Radiance-general] Glass & MTL file troubles... (or how to go from Revit to Radiance with little pain...)

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Rob Guglielmetti wrote:
> Ugh.  Yeah, programs like Revit and 3DS, et al. make glazing planes as 
> 3D objects with six polygons.  No good.  Your errors and problems are 
> definitely related to this.  mkillum expects a single polygon, looking 
> in.
OK, that's what I thought. I'm not using Mkillum yet, just trying to 
make the windows into a Illum source with Skyfunc and not having much luck.
> Not sure how you're flattening the planes, but I'll bet you're still 
> ending up with a pair of triangular polys representing the glass 
> plane, and who the hell knows which way they're facing.  mkillum likes 
> regular polygons.  Page 577 of Rendering with Radiance has the gory 
> details. Not sure the answer to your problem, just stating the issues.
I'll look that up. Thanks for the confirmation.

I'm able to flatten the planes in Max via the 'Edit Poly' modifier. 
Thankfully, all of those 6-sided polys have their Y-axis pointing the 
same way it appears, even if tilted/turned, so I can flatten them all 
with a single tool. However, this doesn't remove the side polys, and 
leaves you with two flat faces I suspect, so I'll have to research this 
method more.
> If you can grep the stuff out, I'd bet you could write something to 
> take the result(s) and generate a corresponding .mat file, with shell 
> scripting techniques, or python or perl, or whatever.
Yeah, my unix god friend pointed me towards AWK as a simple solution. 
I'm just lazy, and can't write code quickly (not a programmer) so I was 
hoping that there might be a solution out there already.
> Sounds like a plan. The thing is, you are closer to real numbers than 
> most lighting designers, by having the wherewithal to tackle 
> Radiance.  Don't short-change yourself.  A good model and sound 
> parameters in Radiance beats any of the tools commonly used in 
> lighting design, IMO.
Didn't know that. Huh. Well, Revit produces very good models (other than 
this glass thing) so I'm halfway there I guess.

Jeffrey