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Re: [Brad] Help:Setting up a radiance system--brad


From: Thomas Bleicher
Subject: Re: [Brad] Help:Setting up a radiance system--brad
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:48:01 +0100

Hi Steve.

Glad you could go on with your own verification. However the rcalc
line below only works for your particular case and a white light
source as you only use the red component of the radiance rgb tripple.
For any other simulation the expression in the rcalc call is

rcalc -e '$1=($1*0.265+$2*0.670+$3*0.065)*179'


BTW: 71.8 lux at 3 meters distance from a TWIN T5 lamp fitting
looks wrong to me. It might have an direct/indirect distribution
but I'd expect more flux to come out of such a fitting.

You are right about the IES+MGF thing. MGF never found acceptance
outside of the academic circle. At the time it was too sophisticated
as a material model for the popular renderers and the lighting
manufacturers didn't bother for a long time to provide 3D data for
their fittings. When they finally started (and only a few do provide
this information) they only served the commercial applications like
Lightscape or 3D MAX/VIZ.

Now some start to provide ULD data files. AFAIK that's only a bundle
of IES or LDT and some other information like product images or 3D data.
So far I couldn't find specs for it or we might already have implemented
something for brad.

The 3D files you can get are of limited use, though. Some of
them are highly detailed and make your Radiance scene unnecessarily
complex. They don't do anything to the distribution which is still
read from the IES data. Their main purpose is to provide interior
designers etc. with geometry they can use in their fancy visualisations.

Radiance does not need visible geometry to create it's light sources.
The fitting is replaces by an light emitting object. The shape can be
a sphere, a cube, a disc or a rectangle and is created by ies2rad with
the information about the luminous area from the IES file. The light
emitting material does not need to be visible and you can use this
to place a more detailed 3D geometry inside the light emitting box.

Without special treatment the fitting will be dark, though. You have
to use a 'glow' material to make some of it's surfaces look as bright
as in a physical luminaire. This brings us back to the start: Either
there is no 3D geometry or it's not suitable without manual tweaking.
It is probably better to use a few Radiance primitives in the *.rad
file to approximate the shape of the fitting. A few polygons and a
cylinder should do the trick for most fittings.


Anyway, have fun with brad and Radiance.

Thomas






On 18 Apr 2007, at 00:40, steve michel wrote:

Most of the ies I've seen only contain lumen angle data.
Luckliy radiance has some tools which helped me validate the ies2rad conversion and scale (courtesy of axel jacobs tutorial). I generate the octree file then used rtrace and racalc:

[steve]$oconv TWINT5.rad > TWINT5.oct
[steve]$ echo "0 0 -3 0 0 1" | rtrace -I -h -ov TWINT5.oct |rcalc - e '$1=179*$1'
71.7976876 [lx] illuminance at 3m from fixture.

this calculated and returned the lx at the set workplane distance. But other than wanting to check illuminace I would like fixture manufacturers to provide the models to visualise the lighting complete with the fixtures. But I think modelling a facsimile of the fixture with the address@hidden ies lamp data, might interfere with the lighting model. Can anyone confirm this? Or post sample ies photmetry with full mgf data .



From: Thomas Bleicher <address@hidden>
Reply-To: address@hidden
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Brad] Help:Setting up a radiance system--brad
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:38:37 +0100


Hi Steve.

Providing photometry is not the most popular thing among manufacturers. The files you get typically are years old (no problem there because the fittings are as old or sometimes much older) and do not always conform
to the IES or Eulumdat standard.

In you particular case I'd guess that the IES file does not contain
correct luminaire dimensions and represents the fitting with a small
ball or disk for any calculation programm. Usually this is not a
problem as most (other) calculation software does not offer the same
level of control as Radiance does. In those apps it doesn't matter
where the light physically comes from.

You can use the '-g' option of ies2rad to create a separate scene file
from the mgf geometry in your file. To preview any scene file use the
'objview' script that's installed with Radiance. It takes the scene
file, places it in an illuminated environment and starts rvu with
the right view parameters. That should give you an idea of the shape
of the fitting.

How can you verify your Radiance light source?
I'd get one of the popular calculations apps (Relux or Dialux) load
the IES file into that and calculate the light distribution of a simple
box with one light fitting in it. If Radiance achieves the same
pattern and roughly the same values you can assume that you have
converted the IES file correctly.

About your last question:
Light sources that have a complex light output (like those based
on IES photometry) are created as light emitting geometry in
Radiance. You can have simple spotlights but I don't remember
if brad does create them by default.


Regards,
Thomas


On 16 Apr 2007, at 18:37, steve michel wrote:

I used the ies2rad utility and with getbbox on the generated rad file, I get bounding box dimensions that don't correspond to the lamp geometry. For example a fixture with a T8 lamp returns a getbbox dimension of .1,.1,.1 (xyz). The ies file I used includes mgf data and a .dxf file was generated (via ies2rad or brad). Is there a way to confirm the fixture/lamp scale and preview it???


And in general, should the lamps loaded via brad's libraries appear as lamps or geometric emitting objects? Eg.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ---------------

>
> > 3/ this issue is probably trivial for experienced users: SCALING of lights
> >
> > If I insert a radiance ies light into a blender scene, how do I check that > > the relative scales of blender objects AND radiance lights coincide????? A > > room 10x 10 units in blender with an inserted light fixture from radiance > > libraries might might too small or too big..does anyone know of this and/or
> > can explain???
>
>Just make sure that you use units consistently in your file.
>For instance I always use metres.
>So if I get a model in millimetres, I scale it down with a .001 factor. >Then ies2rad by default outputs geometry and photometries using meters
>(-dm), so I have no problems.
>Perhaps you're trying to use the desktop radiance luminaires?
>They are in foot, if I remember well, so you must scale them
>appropriately, and redo the ies2rad run to get the photometries right.
>
>HTH,
>
>Francesco
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Brad mailing list
>address@hidden
>http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/brad


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