[Radiance-general] Radout

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi,

I would agree with Christopher on Rhino and Sketchup. Blender does 
export obj also and does seem to be a robust application, although my 
main experience with it has been testing it to process obj geometry.

I think the challenge is figuring out a suitable workflow for those who 
need to use Autocad for whatever reason.... However the traditional 
options (TORAD and RADOUT) are pretty ancient at this point and have the 
following problems:

    * TORAD - if I recall correctly this still only deals with surface
      geometry which is fine if you know how to model this way...
    * RADOUT - same issue as TORAD with respect to geometry and the last
      version of Autocad that it could run in was Autocad 2000

For me I think that the most suitable intermediate geometry format is 
OBJ. It is open and there are lots of applications that can read and 
write the format. The challenge is figuring out how to get from Autocad 
to OBJ.

-Jack

-- 
# Jack de Valpine
# president
#
# visarc incorporated
# http://www.visarc.com
#
# channeling technology for superior design and construction



Christopher Rush wrote:
> If you want to stick with AutoCAD, have you tried TORAD.lsp that has been posted (with modification as required for your version)?
>
> My 2 cents on other options...
>
> I would comment that Rhino and Sketchup both produce good OBJ files that can be converted with obj2rad. You will have to start paying attention to material assignments (instead of or in addition to layers that you would have been used to in AutoCAD). Rhino is probably more expensive, but handles curved geometry much better, and has a more flexible command line interface similar to AutoCAD. Sketchup focuses on being more intuitive, but can be limited in some ways like coordinate entry. Sketchup has the su2rad plugin, and Rhino now has DIVA for additional options to get models into Radiance based simulations.
>
> Lars has suggested FormZ, which seems comparable to Rhino but maybe less popular.
>
> There is also Blender, which is an open source software similar to 3DSMax. It claims to export to OBJ, so may be a good try for a free test before putting money into another modeling package.
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