[Radiance-general] dxf2rad

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Jack de Valpine wrote:
> Hey Rob,
>
> Wow 300Mb, I start being highly suspicious at around 25MB for a CAD 
> model.  On the other hand, I think this BIM stuff is going to go 
> somewhere, so figuring out how to manage the data is going to be an 
> issue worth investigating. I suspect it is particularly nasty if you 
> are trying get data out for use in Autocad 2000. I wonder if would be 
> any more "inter-operable" going from Revit to 2008.
Hi Jack,

At the risk of sounding like a crusty old man, I've been hearing that 
this is going somewhere for over a decade now.  But I do agree that 
hardware and to a certain extent software is looking more than ever like 
it's ready for this challenge.  I still would argue that the end users 
are not.  Despite there being an AIA layer naming standard for ten 
years, I have yet to get a couple of drawings from a couple of 
architects that use the same "standard". 

And yes, it does seem like the further you go back, version-wise, the 
more problems you have.  The file size issue is related to this; each 
progressive version downgrade caused the file to grow a bit more.  In 
our case, this model was exported to AutoCAD 2008 format by the 
architect, then converted by me to 2004 and 2000 format, just to see the 
differences.

> As an aside, I really wish that the folks at Autodesk would provide a 
> method for exporting to obj format. Not that this helps with managing 
> gigantic 3D data sets, but it would at least provide good workflow 
> from Autodesk tools to other applications....
Yeah, I agree.  This is one of the reasons for our office purchasing a 
license of SketchUp Pro, is the export capability.

- Rob