[Radiance-general] IES file viewer

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Greg!
>
> What are the system requirements for your interactive viewer?  Would 
> people like to have something that generates falsecolor plots?  I 
> don't think it would be terribly difficult to create a script for that.
I have been looking in that, too. I think a great solution would be a 
tool that converts IES into

a) .rad: "wireframe" geometry, a bit like what genworm does, normalizing 
the dimensions so that one scale it according to luminous output and 
place it in a scene to explain light sources' qualities.

b) .meta: polar line plots like the common diagrams we get, which is 
what we are used to look at. This would
provide an easy way to compare the data we get in our IES with the data 
the manufacturer published in print.

I think both is doeable even using nothing but shell scripts, genworm 
and the various plotting utilities coming with radiance. The problem I 
was facing was the IES format, with all its variations. To create a 
parser that really handles all IES luminaire distribution formats seems 
to be not that easy, especially if you want to extract metadata, too 
(which would be nice to have included in the plot in case b) and as 
comment lines in the scene in case a).

Maybe these two could also be just options for ies2rad...

CU Lars.