[Radiance-general] dxf2rad

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 24 Oct 2007, at 16:19, Greg Ward wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> In general, unless a data representation is published and stable,
> it doesn't make much sense to support it in a translator, as the
> next version that comes out will likely break it. If there is a
> published standard for Sketchup files, or something closely related
> (a higher-level output from Sketchup), that would be interesting to
> look at.

I don't think the format of the Sketchup files (*.skp) is published
or would be useful as a converter basis. Sketchup (Pro and free) also
support the Google Earth file format which I believe is actually the
current everybody's darling Collada - don't remember where I got this
information from, though. Collada is published and documented but not
exactly easy to understand (at least for me).

Sketchup's Ruby API is limited, badly documented and not officially
supported by Google. Nevertheless I believe it will stay and won't
be rewritten completely in the next release because the developers
appear to test new features in Ruby before they get implemented in C
('sketchy physics' is one example). Also I don't think Google has
enough developers working on Sketchup to start a rewrite just for
the fun of annoying the users.

The API is sufficient to quickly come up with non-interactive scripts
to access or manipulate the 3D scene. It takes a while to figure out
how things are supposed to work but there are plenty of examples for
trivial things like a polygon exporter. If you want a nice looking
interface you can use DHTML - but then it gets rather messy.

Well then, back to coding ...

Thomas