[Radiance-general] import to Radiance

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Jia!
> I asked this question in Autodesk Discussion Group and they say "FBX from
> Revit 2010 is only compatible with Max 2010. It doesn't work like
> earlier versions of FBX where other programs could open it."  So the problem
> is that current Revit uses a new version of fbx while Rhino seems to use an
> old one.
>   
Sounds familiar to anyone who has been using Autodesk-products before. 
Once you save your data in one of their formats, it is basically gone - 
formats are changing with every release and are hardly documented anywhere.

Still as another hint, there are two attempts to get access to at least 
some data in dwg files. One is still in development:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/

They have not published their recent updates to the code, but aim at 
some rather ambitious parsing library for dwg.

The other attempt is support for 3d-dxf in Blender:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.4/Py/Scripts/Import/DXF-3D

The idea here is to ignore dwg (which is changing too often and has 
terrible documentation if any) and instead rely on dxf. They recommend 
the use of another external tool to convert from dwg to dxf in case it 
is required, which works perfectly fine also using wine on Linux.

Still, as a note from my side: if Revit does not support any export out 
of Autodesk formats at all, and the application is generating models for 
simulation - may be Revit is just the wrong software for this? There is 
a lot of great, relieable modeling software out there developed by 
companies playing fair and not locking users away from their own data... 
I cannot imagine to spend money on a modeler that does not support any 
standard format (e.g. step or iges would be a must and would already 
solve your problems).

Cheers, Lars.