[Radiance-general] Just discovered

[Thomas Bleicher]

Hello, John.

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 10:49 PM, John <john.sullivan.cl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is John and I am trying to get automatic communication between Radiance
> and other programs for my thesis.
> I just discovered this group.

Welcome.

> These archives look very useful. Hopefully I have not been wasting
> my time working on something that the people here have completed
> already.

Don't worry, it wouldn't be the first time ...

> Has anybody figured out, for example, how to incorporate radiance
> simulations into loops running in other programs?

Linking an application to Radiance (for control or geometry input) is
in general a three step process:

1) export the scene geometry to Radiance (write text files)
2) control the steps necessary for the Radiance calculations (execute
system commands)
3) import the results back into your application (read text or binary files)

I expect that most advanced modelling or scientific applications
have scripting capabilities that allow you to do these three tasks.

> such as rhino, autocad, or even matlab?

Others have already written about Matlab.

For Rhino you can have a look at DIVA-for-Rhino (www.diva-for-rhino.com)
which does at least the export and control bits. I think it's focused on
Daysim but that's more or less tailored version of Radiance

Autocad has a number of scripting options. I think VBA should
allow you to script all the necessary steps. You may have a
problem with the export because Autocad does not always allow
access to polygone data that's necessary for Radiance. I am not
aware of a current project or product that exports from Autocad
to Radiance.

There are also a number of 3D modellers for which Radiance
export tools are available. Some (like Blender) are open source
so you can get all of the source code and modify it as required.

Let us know about your progress.

Regards,
Thomas