[Radiance-general] dxf2rad

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 23 Oct 2007, at 13:43, Jack de Valpine wrote:

> Hi Tom,
>
> One workflow option, much as I dislike suggesting it, is perhaps to  
> use
> Sketchup as an intermediate. It looks like Vectorworks will save  
> out an skp.
> Sketchup (commercial version) can then save out an obj format file,  
> which can
> be converted with obj2rad. I have very limited experience with  
> Sketchup, but
> in my few experiences, I have found that the models are very very  
> hefty.

Sketchup is no so bad. I have written a Ruby script to export  
Sketchup models
to Radiance and I'm about to finish and release it soon (I keep  
saying that
for 2 weeks now...). Sketchup has some nice features (like n-sided  
polygons
and a total lack of complex geometric primitives) that can be translated
nicely into Radiance. It has not seen much testing (yet) and if Tom  
needs
a solution today I can only offer a work in progress.

Anyway, Sketchup doesn't make the models 'hefty'; it's the users. If you
have a messy model in Sketchup/Vectorworks/Autocad it will end in a  
messy
model in Radiance.

I remember that there is another script around which was presented at  
the
first Radiance Workshop in Fribourgh years ago. That might have seen  
some
further development and be in a more user friendly state.

Other options: does Vectorworks offer a scripting API? A very simple
Radiance exporter should not be hard to do and can probably be derived
from a sample script (access to the 3D faces is all that's required).

You could use Blender and Francesco's or my own export scripts. The
biggest problem is to find a format of the DXF file that Blender can
understand. But that's the problem of all export-import-export tool
chains (and ultimately of the DXF file format).

Finally, I have written a partial DXF to Radiance converter in Python
once. It was written with one particular DXF file in mind and I don't
think I even added support for 3D faces. If you have a small DXF example
I could see if it works and perhaps add bit to support the most basic
files. I stopped playing around with that because I couldn't work out
some problems with transformations. But if Vectorworks exports to a  
plain
3D space it should be fine.

Regards,
Thomas