Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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Getbbox is indeed the way to go for obtaining the extents of your geometry. You're doing the right thing by creating separate .rif files for interior and exterior views/calculations. What's the issue with just using getbbox? If you're looking for a more automated way to get those coordinates into your .rif file you could just put a call to getbbox in a rendering/calculation pipeline script, that calls getbbox, stores the extents coordinates, and then reads the whole rif file in and modifies the ZONE line.
I would encourage you to read up on the ambient exclude stuff (-ae option to many of the tools) to keep the ambient rays from getting totally out of hand when including far-reaching exterior shading geometry.
