[Radiance-general] New Radiance Website

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Andy, hi list!


This is a nice framework for an appealing site! I especially like the
fact that the design of the "good old" site could be adopted.

I started setting up something related recently. Not based on Plone but
Drupal, not a complete "Radiance Website" but a concept focussing on
just having a working FAQ one day. You may get an idea here:

http://radiance.larsgrobe.de

The only part of interest on the site is the FAQ for now. I have spent
some time on thinking how to organize a FAQ, and abandoned the idea of
having single categories per question. I believe a tag-system being much
more appropriate, e.g. a question/answer pair on mkillum might be
related to "commands", "diffuse indirect calculation", "complex glazing"
and "optimizations". One day one might decide to also tag the content on
user levels, so a tag "advanced user" might be added. Browsing the
mailing lists, there is such a vast amount of information that I tend to
pay a lot of attention on the topic of marking it. Once a certain amount
of content is available, tag clouds (which may occur in alphabetical
order - I do not rely like the fancy cloud displays typically rendered
with lots of formatting) may be of more help then a fixed hierarchy.

One feature that I spent some time on was to integrate tex notation into
the content management. I added a test on the start page. You can embed
any Latex code in the content, which will be rendered into inline
images, but also be available as pdf downloads. The need to display
formulas and algorithms seams to be of importance. I am going to add
support for describing geometry in the content management, too -
basically I want to keep content descriptive and avoid bitmap images as
far as possible, so that content can be reused (e.g. for copying the
Latex source into a formula editor when writing an article), reformatted
and extended at any time.



On sharing: I think that sharing models is an interesting part of a
community website, though I am not sure that much model content will
become available. Most Radiance models are case-studies - buildings,
rooms, facades. Objects to be shared are more like furniture and other
decorative stuff, not bound to a specific use case - which is already
available on the internat. Similar is true for textures.



I see a need for sharing of cal-files. This would require an interface
where I could check the parameters and get a preview of the results -
downloading the cal-file is easy, using it makes things difficult.


The gallery is a must....


A Radiance material library would be great and is a topic on its own. I
started a concept of holding material data in a database, with several
interfaces to access it. I would prefer the data to be independent of
the software using it, so e.g. I would want spectral resolutions
supported beyond the three RGB channels natively supported by Radiance.

Extracting a Radiance material from this could be implemented in the
interface - combining the measured data from the database with the
assumptions to be made when using it in Radiance (e.g. I would need to
know that the data from the spectrometer are to be used with a plastic
modifier). So a material record could contain a table "models", where I
could add proposed models for various software tools. So querying the
model-table for "Radiance" for this material would return "plastic",
while querying for "MyOtherRenderer" could return "lambertianReflection".



I decided not to publicly announce this project so far, as there is
little content right now. Maybe there is some potential for combining
efforts, so I add this to the discussion.

Cheers, Lars.