[Radiance-general] Radout

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi!

First, I would recommend dxf2rad, not torad or radout.

Second, modelers ar great, but often lack precision you need for  
building models. You do not need nurbs for most architectural  
simulation, but good precision. That is why I mentioned formz, maybe  
Rhino offers the same. Blender is not made for this (but good for  
conversion and such, as it supports quite a lot of formats and  
geometry functions).

I had mentioned the option to use brlcad for one simple reason.  
Autocad is popular, but a horror for people who want to keep their  
project data in standard formats. They change format support from  
version to version and keep the dwg format closed and it's development  
unpredictable. Keeping only the geometry (obj) is not a good solution.  
So I have been looking for options to link Radiance to open and  
standardized formats. IGES is one, STEP another. A lot of Cad software  
supports these. And as brlcad can convert them into obj on the command- 
line, it is possible to keep all geometry in such Cad formats and  
convert on the fly. I think for people who want to access their  
projects 10 years later a great advantage, and the only reason I  
mention it here.

About texteditors, it depends on the project. A lot of simulation  
models require little detail, but high precision. And using genbox and  
Co not only avoids leaks, but makes sure that you control surface  
normal orientation. But it all depends on needed complexity of  
geometry and on what you want to do with yor model.

Cheers, Lars.

--
Dipl.-Ing. Architect Lars O. Grobe

On Aug 6, 2010, at 23:21, Jack de Valpine <jedev at visarc.com> wrote:

> 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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