Radiance Exercise from Radiance Tutorial

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I'm Currently at page 15 of Radiance Tutorial by Axel Jacbos. There's a part I don't understand:

Specifically, number 5: 'Create a file called furniture.rad from which you call xform to place a table in the scene and a couple of chairs around it. You'll find them in objects/table.rad'

xform hasn't been mentioned in the previous tutorials so I just searched for what the program does, apparently it applies transformations/rotations to an object. I'm not sure how to use xform in general, nor how to use it in this example.

Here's what I tried:

Inside objects/furniture.rad:
!C:\Radiance\bin\xform table >> furniture
!C:\Radiance\bin\xform chair >> furniture

I just called xform without any options because I'm assuming table and chair are already in the proper places? Which is I know, is probably wrong.

Apparently, objline is not available in Windows, so I use Honeybee for GH to view the rad files. And as expected, my rad files don't generate anything. I also tried importing the furniture and chair rad files but the Rhino viewport doesn't show anything.

What's the correct way to do it? Thanks.

There are a couple of ways to use xform; you're sorta trying to use them both at the same time. Try calling xform on the object rad files without the redirect. From the context of Axel's tutorial, I'm guessing (it's been a while since I've read that) you are supposed to be creating a file called "furniture.rad" in the main working directory, and that "objects" is a subdirectory thereof. Create a new text file called "furniture.rad" and put the following lines in it:

!C:\Radiance\bin\xform .\objects\table.rad
!C:\Radiance\bin\xform .\objects\chair.rad

Presumably you will call "furniture.rad' in a similar way, in some other scene file, to "assemble" your model. This is the same approach we use in OpenStudio; we have a subdirectory for glazing, another one for opaque construction, and one for materials. Then in the main directory there is a single file called "model.rad", which merely has calls to xform e.g.:

!xform ./scene/Space_1.rad
!xform ./scene/glazing/WG0.rad

At runtime, we make an octree by adding materials files and the "model.rad" file, along with any design iteration-specific geometry. Make sense?

P.S. The first example's syntax is for Windows users, the second for Unix peeps (and presumes your Radiance executables are in your PATH). The leading dot in the file references is not needed if you have the "current directory dot" in your system PATH.