[Radiance-general] Louvered skylights simulation

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi!
>
> -Is Radiance the best simulation tool available for the object I want 
> to simulate?
>
> -How would you conceptually implement a louvered skylights with motion?
>
Hard to answer the first question. For the second, I used environment 
variable in my scene files for similar applications. That allows you to 
use any tool you could imagine (I used perl scripts in most cases) to 
calculate the transformation (if you want to use xform) and other 
parameters, assign these to environment variables and have these 
expanded in the scene file. You may build your own tools on the output 
of other Radiance programs, e.g. I used gensky to get the sun vector 
when I scripted a tracking mirror and only had to filter out the 
relevant information using regular expressions.

One step further would be to write a tool that writes not only these 
parameters, but the geometry description to stdout, so that it could be 
embedded in the scene file. Radiance is very flexible when it comes to 
integration with other, external tools.

Cheers, Lars.