I have just released v0.1 of the Vi-Suite which can be downloaded from the Vi-Suite website located at http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/vi-suite. As the version number suggests this is still very much a beta release, but it has become hard enough for me to find bugs for me to I consider it worth doing a release.
VI-Suite
An integrated suite of environmental analysis tools within Blender
Hi, this all looks really great now! I just started playing a bit with the Blender interface. One detail I did not really like was the hard-coded path environment variables, which pointed to somewhere in /usr/local – which I do not use with Radiance. I changed the variables in the init-file, which allows me to run Radiance from within Blender now. However, in my opinion a clean way to handle this would be to rely on Radiance being installed correctly, including PATH and RAYPATH variables set, so that no hard-coded path would be evaluated at all.
What I could not solve was getting matplotlib functional. I have Blender 2.71 installed, which is based on python 3.4, and followed the instructions (well, I did not copy the python-frameworks but rather sym-linked them). Still LiVi tells me something is wrong with my matplotlib installation. Has any testing been done on Blender 2.71 so far?
Finally, is there a way to get some more advanced stuff into the Radiance simulation, such as the newer modifiers (BSDF)?
Besides that – thanks for the great work!
Lars.
Hi Lars.
Thanks for your comments. I agree the hard coded paths are a bit clumsy but a focus for the VI-Suite is to be accessible by non-expert users, and I wasn’t sure Radiance creates paths during installation on all platforms. My current approach for the v0.2 release is to look for the default installation paths on each platform and if they’re not there fall back to a VI-Suite folder that contains the relevant bundled Radiance and EnergyPlus executables.
If you open a python window in blender and enter:
import matplotlib.plplot as plt
it should tell you in more detail what you are missing.
In the testing repository of the VI-Suite on google code I have implemented a BSDF generator in Blender’s Object Data panel. This BSDF then gets stored within the Blender object and written out to the Radiance scene description. I haven’t yet however figured out why the BSDF does not show up in rvu or rtrace. If you have any insights on this I’d be very interested. What other new modifiers are you referring to?
V0.2 works with the latest Blender. I have not tried v0.1 on Blender 2.71 but it should in theory be OK. If you want version v0.2 I can send you a link. It is much more *robust* then version 0.1 but the documentation, the only thing holding me back from a new release, is out of date.
Regards
Ryan
i have the same problem with matplotlib in OS X :
>>> import matplotlib.plplot as plt
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
ImportError: No module named ‘matplotlib’
The error means that the VI-Suite cannot find a matplotlib installation. If you are using the OSX zip file from the vi-suite website it should he included and I’ll look into it. If you have downloaded and installed just the the vi-suite scripts directory you need to install matplotlib on your Mac.
Ryan