[Radiance-general] Sketchup exporter script

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 26 Nov 2007, at 20:20, steve michel wrote:

> Thanks again for the export script. The following was in  
> Fransceco's wiki as a
> future feature (no pun intended)
> <<replacement of component instances with pre-canned Radiance files>>
>
> I hope this will enable the script's ability to handle artificial  
> lighting.

Yes. That's my lazy take on IES file support.

> I have some ies fixtures i've used in some radiance renders I want
> to use in the Sketchup to radiance generated files.
> So far I've only the following method:
> 1 step converted ies to rad files
> 2 Use mkillum for a wrapper for fixture geometry
> 3 'update' the script generated files to search/replace a
>   named scene 'place holder' with items 1 and 2.
>
> Does this approach make sense? If there is a more straight forward
> way, please let me know.

Search and replace could be done with replmarks. Use triangles
where you want your fittings, find the corresponding "!xform ..."
line for the triangles file and replace it with the correct
"!replmarks ..." line (I assume you have already prepared the
Radiance description of the fitting, ies2rad and all that).

Alternative (more along the lines of how I think about Radiance
and the Sketchup scenes):

1) create a "component instance" for the light fitting (shaped as
    the fitting for better placement)
2) place instance in scene
3) export
4) replace the file that represents the instance in the "objects/"
    directory with a file that's created by ies2rad (and spiced up
    with a bit of geometry if you like)

The idea behind the "pre-canned" files is that every component instance
_loaded_ into Sketchup has an associated file path. The script could  
just
check if next to the component's ".skp" file another file with ".rad"
and ".dat" extension exists and copy these files instead of exporting
the actual component geometry.

IES support then would require you to create a Radiance file for the
fitting (with geometry and correct ".dat" file path), the ".dat" file
and a Sketchup component to represent the fitting in the scene. When
you load and use the component it gets replaced with the Radiance files
on the fly. Other options like dimming could be shoehorned into this
process as well.

> Is there a straight forward way of handling instances

Is there more than one way of handling an instance in Sketchup?


Update for those who've faithfully read this far:

I have created a google code project for this script:

     http://code.google.com/p/su2rad/

The download package is still at the last 'release' stage
but the SVN repository has the hot new features
* export by layer
* export by colour and
* import with contour lines

As usual it hasn't seen a lot of testing yet.


Cheers,
Thomas