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

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Bleicher, Thomas wrote:
> I think your looking for high quality renderings of the interior, so
> you definitely want to use mkillum to restrict your scene to the interior.
> If it's just a crude rendering I'd create a sky and wouldn't bother
> much about the windows as light source.
>   
That's what we've got going, it's a building with lots of glass and 
skylights and such. So do you think just having the windows be glass 
would be enough to get somewhat-close numbers? I fear that not making 
the glass a secondary light source, and just having it be, well, glass 
and only having the ray of sunlight bouncing around is going to give me 
bad numbers.
> You could write a script to delete polygons with material glass based
> on their area (reduce 6 sides to 2) and vicinity to already checked
> polygons (reduce 2 to one) but that's not going to be easy. You might
> be able to edit the windows in MAX to get a Radiance friendly geometry. 
>   
That's what I'm doing, I can edit them in Max via the 'Edit Poly' 
modifier, but I'll need to research this more. I want to stay away from 
hand-editing much of anything, for I want to be able to go back and edit 
the Revit model, re-export to Max, and from there re-export to OBJ2RAD 
for quick revisions. So far, so good on that front, but this glass thing 
is leaving me stumped.
> Please see the man page for obj2rad. The top section describes
> material mapping based on the context (or material) of the face
> in the obj file. If you use the same set of materials in all your
> models you could create a material library and a corresponding
> mapping file. Obj2rad then assigns the correct Radiance material
> name (as far as I understand this point, never used it much).
>   
I saw that. I was hoping there was a way to use the .MTL file that's 
already generated by Max. Basically, I'm just being lazy, and hoping 
there was an existing solution out there.
> You're welcome! If you can provide Radiance geometry we might
> offer a discount ... ;)
Now that doesn't sound like a bad idea! ;-)

-- 

Jeffrey McGrew

Because We Can, LLC
(415) 505-4689
www.becausewecan.org