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Radout User Manual (3.9.7)

• Description
  
• Installation
  
• Loading
  
• Interface
  
• Options
  
• Files
  
• Requirements
  
• Caveats
  
• Bugs
  
• Authors
  
• See Also
  
• Legalese
  

Autocad entities can be selected and filtered by numerous options.

Entities are sorted either by color or by layer. The sorting results in seperate files written for every layer or color. Other files created optionally contain initial material definitions (plastic with the color as visible in autocad), a set up of sun and sky and a rif file as direct input to rad(1).

Only the entities that are visible (that is their layer is on and thawed) will be exported, even when nested in a selected block. This provides another method of filtering elements of your drawing especially usefull when you want to update only part of a scene.

The layer name or color number will be part of each respective filename to make it an unique identifier. The pipe character "|" used by Autocad within layernames associated with externally referenced blocks, as well as the dollar sign "$" are replaced by an underscore "_" as they are illegal or at least confusing characters for filenames on most systems.

Installation

There are a number of toggles to switch on or off by by selecting toggle buttons in the dialog box. Some of the toggles affect the access to some of the others as it is apropiate for writing only subsets of the possible data. In such a case the corresponding input facilities in the dialog box will be grayed out and so disabled.

The dialog box looks as follows on Windows:

Options

Write Filetypes:

The following toggles and settings (upper right boxed column of the dialog box) specify which types of information to export:

Radout does not edit the exported files. Every time you export data, any existing files with the same names will be overwritten without warning.

Geometry files

This switch is on by default for it is the generic purpose of the program. Turning it off will disable the list of sampled entity types and the sampling mode selection.

Materials file

The materials of the exported objects will have the same color (a plastic) as they appear with in autocad.

Radiance Input File (rif)

This file can be given to the rad(1) program and contains all the basic information needed to run a simulation.

Exterior daylight file

This option sets the parameters of natural lighting as required by gensky. The input fields activated by this option determine your location (Longitude/Latitude) and time of day and year (Month/Day/Hour/Timezone).

Sampling modes:

These settings (the lower right boxed column in the dialog box) let you specify the way the geometrical information will be converted.

Assign materials by:

Select the sorting method here out of the following.

Color

The Autocad color number as visible on the screen. This is the default and will help you when you organize your drawing "visually".

Layer

The layer of every subentity (the one which this entity is created on). Choose this method if you use a conceptual layering system independently from screen display colors.

The concept of floating layers and colors within (nested) blocks is fully supported. That means a subentity within a block with on layer "0" and/or with the color "byblock" will appear on the layer and with the color of the containing block. This continues recursively if the block has those properties as well until a level with explicitly defined properties or the top level block is reached. Toplevel entities with the color "byblock" are drawn with color nr. 7 (white).

Distance Tolerance for arc approx:

Arc entities and arc segments of polylines have to be meshed for the use in RADIANCE. The value you enter here specifies how smooth these meshes will appear in the final image. Higher values will make smoother surfaces. The default of 0.1. It is recommended to make test for optimised settings balancing file size and visual accuracy, since the optimal settings depends on the size and scale of your model.

Distance Tolerance for arc approx:

(This option is not available for all versions of Radout) The orientation of neighbouring mesh elements will not differ by more than this amount in degrees. The default is 15.0 degrees, which usually gives reasonable results. The effect of this setting is independent of model size and complexity. Please note that very low values (eg. below 2.0 degrees) can lead to unreasonably big output files and may even crash Autocad when running out of memory.

Output scaling factor

Output geometry will be scaled according to this factor. Radiance preferrably uses international (SI) units, ie. meters.

Geometry to Export:

The current export types and their results are the following:

3DFACEs

3dfaces will be split to two triangular polygons if not planar.

Extruded TRACEs

Traces will appear as a single polygon or as a box if the thickness is not zero.

Extruded SOLIDs

Solids will appear as a single polygon or as a box if the thickness is not zero.

Extruded CIRCLEs

Circles will appear as a ring with a inner radius of zero or as a cylinder/tube with a ring at either end if their thickness is different from zero.

Extruded ARCs

Arcs with a thickness different from zero will be segmented according to the given arc tolerance.

Extruded LINEs

Lines with a thickness different from zero will appear as a single polygon.

Extruded 2D-PLINEs

2d-polylines with a thickness different from zero will appear as a set of polygons. With R14, this includes lightweight polylines.

Wide 2D-PLINEs

2d-polylines with a starting width different from zero set in their header entity (not the vertexes!) will appear as a polygon following the trace of the polyline with a constant width. This option will override the one below for poly- lines that match both categories. Together with a thickness and the respective option set this will will result in a kind of a quadrilateral worm. With R14, this includes lightweight polylines.

3D-MESHes

The Faces of 3d-polygon meshes will appear as a set of polygons ignoring spline fits of any kind. Nonplanar faces will be split into two triangles.

POLYFACEs

The faces of polyface meshes will appear as a set of polygons. Nonplanar faces will be split into two triangles.

Closed 2d-PLINES

2d-polylines with the closed flag set in their header entity will appear as a polygon of the shape of the polyline. polylines with a width will not follow this rule if the option above is chosen as well (Wide 2d-plines). Together with a thickness and the respective option set this will result in a prismatic volume of the shape of the polyline. This option is off by default. With R14, this includes lightweight polylines.

POINTs as Spheres

Point entities will appear as spheres or bubbles depending on either their thickness (if any) or else on the value of the Autocad system variable "PDSIZE". if the result is zero the entity is ignored. This option is off by default.

ACIS entities

The three items relating to ACIS solid modelling entities are disabled, since the free version of Radout doesn't support them.

File Names:

   Copyright © 1994 Philip Thompson, Boston, USA.
   Copyright © 1998-2000 Georg Mischler, Munich, Germany.
 
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