sunlight direction (vectors) creates the shading screens (planes) ?

I have the sunlight direction over a year defined by a lot of vectors and I have a rectangle window facing a "random orientation".

Now I need to find the vertical and horizontal planes around the window which gives full shade from sunlight over a year. (I have manually made a fast sketch in grasshopper, what i think the end result should look like.)

Anybody knows a smart way to create the planes from vector directions? (perhaps project or intersect vectors/planes?) (The planes shall only have 4 vertices, so the planes edges is straight as seen on the picture)

The idea is to later to sort in the vectors and get different useful result.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by djordje on October 19, 2012 at 4:26am

This a very interesting problem.
I can not help you with it, but I would like to know about this too.

Permalink Reply by phillip on October 19, 2012 at 4:54am

Hi Thomas,

you can define a range the points would move outwards normal from your wall. Then you let them create planar surfaces and produce a shadow outline (Mesh-Util-MeshShadow) for each of the vectors.

Now you can define the most important property for these Lines, like maximum/minimum length or regional unions...

Then you would use Galapagos or Goat to find the best result in each case.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Phillip

Permalink Reply by Thomas Perkov on October 19, 2012 at 5:36am

Thanks! I'll try later this week, I find an exampel like my problem at diva4rhino.com .. I'll share the .gh file when I'm done ;-) (if others have a different solution (simpler perhaps) share it! :)

Permalink Reply by Omar Helmy on October 20, 2012 at 2:12pm

Hi Thomas,

I'm gonna reply to this from a Sustainable design point of view. How this is conventionally done, is by using a sun path diagram (or software like Ecotect) to calculate the critical sun angle for this location, facade orientation and opening size. This critical sun angle is a horizontal and vertical sun vectors.

These can be used to manually design sun shades like architects have historically done, or you can feed them as parameters into a GH to show the effect of facade curving or self shading...etc

Sorry i might not be answering your question exactly, but i was trying to do exactly what you mentioned above and did some research on it...

regards,

Permalink Reply by Omar Helmy on October 20, 2012 at 2:24pm