[Radiance-general] New Radiance Website

[Guglielmetti, Robert]

Wow Lars, this looks awesome. This is exciting to see that you have put so
much thought into this, and that Andy's getting an effort at LBNL to buff
up the Radiance web offerings there. This topic has come up before, and as
I recall it was discussed at length at the 2003 workshop. It always seems
to die off. I'm not sure how much time I could devote to this effort, but
I'm happy to contribute what I can.

 
Rob Guglielmetti  IESNA, LEED AP
Commercial Buildings Research Group
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
1617 Cole Blvd MS:RSF202
Golden, CO 80401
T. 303.275.4319
F. 303.630.2055
E. robert.guglielmetti at nrel.gov





On 3/5/12 4:56 PM, "Lars O. Grobe" <grobe at gmx.net> wrote:

>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.
>
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