Using Radiance 3.1 with ArchiCAD 8

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know if there is a translator available to convert Archicad 8 Files for use into Radiance.

There use to be an earlier version of an Archicad translator that did, but it was specifically for a MAC platform and I am currently running on lame windows.

Any information would be just great.

[stefan]

I'm on Windows and have not used the recent version of Radiance, but if it can help:

1 - I have used a 3ds -> Radiance convertor in the past. It's called ConRAD but is only available on Windows and is not developed anymore.
The nice thing was that it handled conversion of texture-mapping.

2 - There are DXF -> RAD conversion utilities. I think there is an OBJ -> Radiance convertor too.

3 - I have made a pretty premature ArchiCAD Addon to export an ArchiCAD model directly as Radiance files. It's not finished, it's not tested on Mac (I don't have one available) and it's not fully working. I don't have time at the moment to work on it either...

That said, I have been able to directly export my ArchiCAD model from ArchiCAD 8.1 and ArchiCAD 9.0 to files that could be rendered in Radiance. I guess I don't do too many platform-specific things.
* Materials are marginally supported (that is, no texturing information, but all material names and the main color are exported and correctly referenced by the geometry). You can edit the materials in the exported files if you want.
* Triangulation is not clean yet (I still have to learn how to get real triangulated geometry out of ArchiCAD - I use polygons with loops now and that seems to work OK).
* Sun position is transferred and camera position, but no lights.
* No settings nor interface yet, so all is hardcoded in the Add-on...

If there are any developers out there that are interested in taking it a step further?

By the way, are you talking about the new Open Source Radiance? I am only using the old Desktop Radiance distribution. I've downloaded the Open Source version, but have not been able to compile it on Windows. Do you have a compiled version?

[Anonymous]

Hey Stefan,

I am only using the desktop version. I am still pretty new to the radiance thing. I am not using a compiler, unfortunately i dont believe that i have enough computer savvy to understand how to use on yet.

Thanks,
Jared