Hello all,
I'm still a Radiance noob, and am just
getting my feet under me in using it, and
I understand on a base level the advantages
and abilities of it.
What I'm wondering is how to deal with
things such as landscaping, people, cars,
and other such 'Entourage' items when
producing design visualization renderings
for projects.
I'm concerned that modeling these items
whole, and including them within the
scene, will add too much complexity to
the project and greatly increase
rendering times on large exterior views.
Many 3D programs allow for 'lightweight'
objects to solve this problem. Accurender
auto-generates trees & plants on the fly
fractally, and Max/Viz allows for 'RPC
Content'. However (and please correct
me if I'm wrong) there aren't any
Radiance add-ons to auto-generate
plants and/or allow for RPC content.
Does everyone typically have these
items as whole Radiance models, instanced
into the 'scene'? Is this not a problem
due to Radiance's render engine's differences
from other 3D packages? What about the
repetitiveness apparent in an image when
the same tree/bush/person/car is used
over and over and over again? I see
some exterior renderings on Visarc's
website that have wonderful looking
trees, does anyone know how those
were done?
Thanks,
Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
I have used a tool called Xfrog to generate trees and plants. With Xfrog
you can order different cd's containing sets of pre-modelled trees. I
have translated some of these into OBJ format, and converted them into
Radiance.
The trees are really nice.
Now the good and the bad news:
The good news is that within Radiance I have rendered about 3000 trees
in a scene without troubles ( expect quite long rendering times).
The bad news is that Xfrog - OBJ conversion is not very easy because of
so called "bad vertices" and invalid normals that are generated by
Xfrog, and Radiance does not accept both bad vertices and invalid
normals.
Therefore I edited the 100MB+ obj files virtually by hand ( using search
and replace in vi, a text editor), to remove all errors: very much work!
There is also Bad News II : I did not succed in getting the mapping of
the bark and leaves right.
If there is anyone in this list who can help you (and me!) to make the
conversion between Xfrog-obj files and Radiance smoother, you will have
a very nice tools with Xfrog.
-Iebele
Jeffrey McGrew wrote:
···
Hello all,
I'm still a Radiance noob, and am just
getting my feet under me in using it, and
I understand on a base level the advantages
and abilities of it.
What I'm wondering is how to deal with
things such as landscaping, people, cars,
and other such 'Entourage' items when
producing design visualization renderings
for projects.
I'm concerned that modeling these items
whole, and including them within the
scene, will add too much complexity to
the project and greatly increase
rendering times on large exterior views.
Many 3D programs allow for 'lightweight'
objects to solve this problem. Accurender
auto-generates trees & plants on the fly
fractally, and Max/Viz allows for 'RPC
Content'. However (and please correct
me if I'm wrong) there aren't any
Radiance add-ons to auto-generate
plants and/or allow for RPC content.
Does everyone typically have these
items as whole Radiance models, instanced
into the 'scene'? Is this not a problem
due to Radiance's render engine's differences
from other 3D packages? What about the
repetitiveness apparent in an image when
the same tree/bush/person/car is used
over and over and over again? I see
some exterior renderings on Visarc's
website that have wonderful looking
trees, does anyone know how those
were done?
Thanks,
Jeffrey
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Hi,
the trick is to use (frozen) octrees as instances and exclude these objects from the ambient calculation. Usually you don't need their ambient contribution. I did this with urban design models and LOTS OF trees (go to www.3dcafe.com 
Ok, I am sure that you have been told about that. I would like to add that the easy way to do is to use markers in your cad-model. You place triangles on one layer per object-type (e.g. one layer car_ferrari, one layer tree_oak, ...). After you converted from cad to rad, you can use radiance to replace the markers with instances. That's the nicest way to place objects I know about - just click the triangles in your CAD where the objects are to appear later.
If you really want to do everything the gui-way... Georg Mischler's rayfront (www.schorsch.com) handles the triangle-marker replacement.
CU and good luck, Lars.
···
--
Lars O. Grobe
[email protected]
