[Radiance-general] Solar Rays Tracing path

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Neha!

> I want to generate Solar Ray Tracing path in Ecotect for solar reflectors.

I do not know much details on Ecotect. If you mean any kind of 
non-planar, specular reflector, than the standard work-flow in Radiance 
will not lead to good results. I think there are to options if you want 
to simulate such a system using Radiance - one being the rtcontrib-tool 
(which I have never used for such tasks), the other the photon map 
extension, which is made exactly for such cases, but available only for 
Radiance 3.7 at the moment.

In any way, you would not get a visualization of single rays. I am not 
sure whether anyone ever developed some script to generate this (whould 
be possible with rtrace by iterating through intersection points from 
grid positions/directions). The typical target results for Radiance 
users would be information on the illuminances reached on a work plane 
by such a system.

> Can some one guide me on this.
> I have calculated this in Shading & Shadows analysis to <<Display Solar 
> Rays>>. But the reflections are not proper.

Again, this seams to be some Ecotect-specific stuff. I have no idea what 
they use for such calculations and whether they have the required 
forward/bidirectional tracing algorithm implemented.

Another hint, many people out there use ASAP for such tasks as reflector 
design and analysis.

Cheers, Lars.