[Radiance-general] a note of thanks

[Lars Grobe]

Hi!

> although i believe its pretty hard (if not impossible?) to run autocad 
> on linux - you could of course do the modelling on a windows computer, 
> and then just transfer the finished file across to the linux computer.

Take a look at www.winehq.com (or org, not sure, it is about the wine project, allowing to run windows-apps under Linux (x86). There is also a directory of apps known to work.

As an alternative, there is Intellicad, which was available free (?) at least some years ago and is very similar to Autocad.

I do not know about any good free 3d-CAD packages for Linux. There are good modelers (AC3d, Blender, ...). Also there are some commercial modelers free for private or education use, like Houdini, Maya etc. In general, real CAD has to be paid under Linux. And as you mentioned your boss, it is not clear to me if you work on a school project or a commercial one.

I did most work on formZ (Mac, but is available for Windows, too). Great tool, but expensive.

Whatever you choose, exporting obj is really valuable, all other formats have drawbacks. Dxf is still well supported by Georg Mischler's dxf2rad, but some advanced features of Radiance are bound to obj.

CU Lars.