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

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Lars Grobe wrote:
> You will get nicer Renderings with lower ambient settings. But with big
> window openings, it should not be really necessary to use mkillum. If you
> use it, consider generating the faces in another tool that gives you more
> control, maybe "even" writing them with an editor.
>   
'Nicer' is good, but I'm worried about the actual numbers. We want 
renderings as well as falsecolor images. If we just wanted nice 
renderings, we'd probably go to vRay, which is kind of our unofficial 
standard for 'sexy' images. If I can get 'ok' renderings but decent 
falsecolor images without having to edit the glass or use it as a 
lightsource I could make this whole process very, very easy.
> Triangles don't work with mkillum. Still, the obj format is not limited to
> triangles, it depends more on the modeler (and you must make sure that the
> panes are 100% plain).
>   
Yeah, when I export to OBJ I'm picking the 'poly' option which seems to 
produce polygons and rectangles. Revit produces rectangles/polys as 
well, it doesn't render everything to triangles like some modelers. So I 
think I'm ok there.
> Do you know obj2rad's -n option?
Yeah, just being lazy, and hoping for an easy solution.

What would be the best is to use the new Revit API to write an Radiance exporter, and skip Max altogether. However, this is beyond my abilities and available time currently (and sadly).

Jeffrey McGrew

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