[Radiance-general] Radiance and Photosynthesis

[David Smith]

Hello fellow raytracers,

I have what I believe to be a rather oblique question. I've used Radmap
before, to get estimations on PV array feasibility. However, I was
recently asked about the feasibility of landscaping in a dense urban
environment. After a lot of searching, I could not find what I had hoped
to find - a categorical list of what grows given a quantity of light, in
terms of light energy, light power*time, illuminance*time, or something
along those lines. I'm left with finding spaces with similar geometry
and determining what is growing and what is not. The only reference I
could find with respect to Radiance was from 1995, with Greg suggesting
that replacing the RGB channels with some quantities that were better
suited to the response of plants. I know it's a stretch to hope that
there are any horticulturists on the list, but has anybody else come
across information or situations involving photosynthetically active
radiation? Any insight is appreciated.

Also, I use Linux on a VirtualPC (Microsoft freeware) in Windows
(Intel). It's sort of like VMWare where a computer is virtualized and
simulated in a "sandbox". It's a clumsy and resource hogging amalgam,
but does let you play around with some of the more fun features of the
*nix versions without a whole lot of hardware and setup hassle. cat
/proc/cpuinfo gives the specs of the main processor, so I wonder what
happens when you run it on a VirtualPC/AMD combination...

--Dave Smith


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