Helllo, I have a question, I wasn’t sure if this was the right forum for it so posted this request on Blendercommunity, they said I shoud post here.
I am an architect with very little experience with Blender. I have been trying to rectify this over the last month as it seems a broad, very competent and customisable program. I have the aim of creating simple workflow models as well as more realistic renders. One of the workflow models I have been working on uses the Sun Position add-on to generate accurate shadow studies.
Yesterday with ChatGPT i investigated scripts and we developed and it wrote one (I have no scripting experience) connected to the sun position that modified the intensity and colour of the sun based on the time of day. It seems to work, I don’t know how accurate it is.
Today I have been trying to develop one that I find very useful and is the topic of this post. There used to be an independent add-on to Sketchup that reported the ammount of sun on a surface based on hours per m2, and rendered an image of that information on the model: so different colours would indicate how many hours of sun a particular area recieved. This was very useful as a sketch indication for landscape planting or position of solar panels etc.
It seems that the script ChatGPT wrote for this will not fetch data from Sun Position add-on. Later it could be developed using epw weather data or solar radiation recieved but now it was just a simple calculation if sun had reached an area for a certain period of time. Can I share these with people on the forum so it can be corrected? Thanks!
Thanks, yes I know it doesn’t sound great but I wanted to make my ignorance completely known! It was a proposal for something simple I found useful and I think others could to. People say learning scripting is easy but I don’t really believe them, which is why I’m here! What do you propose I do?
Thank you, I apologise for mentioning that service - that will remain nameless - I had been using it on and off to resolve specific questions while learning Blender and while looking at the scripting workspace my curiosity got the better of me.
I do think the add-on would be useful. I shall follow your suggestion prepare a proper brief and look into the other forums.
Thanks! Yes I have that Add-on, and yes it seems to work well (it comes as one of the official? add-ons in Blender now). What I am looking for is something that uses the movement of the sun’s position to report how many hours of sun a particular area of land receives.
There was this one, 10 years ago in Sketchup which you can still see on youtube - “IR4SU Sketchup plugin tutorial solar irradiance”. This was a more sophisticated program in that IIRC using weather data files (epw files?) it calculated the solar irradiance in W/m2. I don’t think that is really necessary, as I imagine that greatly complicates the script. Also you would need to calculate the inclination of each receiving surface in relation to the sun at that particular time.
What I think would be as useful is something simple that takes Date and location and Sun Movement data from the Add-on you suggested, and says this
part of the selected area received sun for “X” hours during the set day. This information would be colour coded into 0-6+ or 8+ hour slots and the final result rendered onto an image. That result could also be baked onto the model?
Why do I think it would be useful? Like the reason they developed IR4SU it is useful for assessing the location of solar panels, the performance of which depends on sun hours received. I also find it useful to consider the sunlight hours around a building for planting.
There’s no call to be a jerk to someone asking a question just because you don’t agree with their methods. Please keep replies focused on answering the question and being civil
Thanks! VI-Suite looks it has one of their modules which they call Shadow Mapping which looks like it does what I am looking for! And thanks for the link to wiki.osarch.org.
Thanks, I ldown-loaded that went to Add-ons and installed it (Blender (3.6.3)) and it said it couldn’t find “matplotlib” which is I guess is a part of Python that’s not included in Blender. I downloaded Python, tried to run it in Blender’s directory etc. but it still didn’t want to Enable the Add-on from the tickbox. The latest version you can download is for Blender 2.9 so I don’t know if that’s a/the problem.
I originally tried to load the last release on the downloads page (0.6.1 for Blender 2.93) that had a problem with finding python’s “matplotlib”. Then, from their blog page (May 2022) I downloaded the beta (0.7 for Blender 3.3). It didn’t seem to want to Enable from the Add-ons, then it did sort of after many restarts but tab in the “n” tab was visible but wouldn’t open. So as you suggested I downloaded (0.4 for Blender 2.79) but the video you liked to describing the installation is different and for version 0.6. Installing 0.4 then trying to Enable it gives a series of Python error messages.
So for me, on Blender 3.6.3, while potentially an interesting add-on, this doesn’t work. Which raises two points to me right now. The first is if anybody knows of a working plugin that can do what I need. And second, while having an integrated suite is a nice idea, it is perhaps not the right approach: as the add-on script must become very cumbersome to administer and is more likely to break and become useless. It was also quite a large add-on: 0.6 was nearly 0.5GB.
Thinking of my problem in a way that would be a native way of Blender to resolve it:
Say I rendered an image every hour for a 12/14 hour period. Converted the black to Alpha. Then overlaid those images all on a black background. So that where there was no sun it would remain black and where there was full sun remain white. That would give me a greyscale of the sun path if I could somehow interlace or granulate each layer. I don’t know how I could colour code that though.
vi-suite07 is installed in blendr 3.6.5.
When you enable Addon, it temporarily stops with additional installation file downloads, but if you wait, the installation is complete.
Thanks, I downloaded Blender 3.6.5 and Reinstalled VI-Suite 0.7. I expect the problem before with blender 3.6.3 was my interpreting the problems with the Add-on Enabling as problems with compatibility rather than time it takes to load. In the Add-on menu the VI-Suite still has a Triangle and Exclamation point, but it doesn’t seem to be giving any problems.
I went through the YT tutorial VI-Suite v0.6 - Sky View Factor & Shadow Mapping.
As you can imagine I tried the Shadow Mapping out and it seems to work. Although I am having problems with the Legend. Only the “%time icon” is visible and not the second icon. And the first icon opened once but doesn’t want to open a second time. But that may be a user problem rather than the program! Do you know if there is a way to modify the colour range, change the description to hours not %, and put the no. of days and date range chosen under the Legend title?
Thanks very much Kim for all your help and thanks for the link to the Google Groups VI-Suite community page. I will contact them with any questions. Thanks!
