Bypass the "_grid_size" parameter in Incident Radiation?

Hello!

I’m using an Incident Radiation Analysis on a mesh that is already subdivided; is there any way to bypass the need for specifying the “_grid_size” parameter? My plan is to use the Incident Radiation as an input for expanding or contracting the offset size of a series of panels in a facade script I’ve made (as informed by the radiation intensity at each of those panel cells). However, because it has a unique tiling geometry to it, I’m curious if there is a way to provide an already subdivided surface without needing to subdivide it even further.

Hi @sophwoj,

If you have the geometry as a mesh object, the analysis is performed for each mesh face instead. Then the _grid_size will not influence the subdivision of the mesh. In the image below I used a mesh (equally divided 5 x 5) as the _geometry input on the results on the right. The _grid_size is the same for both, but the mesh has not been subdivided.

If you have each cell as an individual surface you could also add all of them to the _geometry input, and then set the _grid_size to something very large. In the example below the _grid_size is 5 on the left and 0.5 on the right. You can see that on the left the geometry is not subdivided because the grid size is much larger than the geometry.

Thank you so much Mikkel! Yes, that was exactly what I was looking for - I didn’t think to consider that as a possibility.

Followup - when I remove the grid size parameter, it gives me an error message saying “Input parameter _grid_size failed to collect data” even if I provide a mesh input into the Geometry parameter. Since it doesn’t seem to have a default value if no value is provided, is there a particular [_grid_size] value to provide that would produce the least amount of subdivision upon each mesh face?

If you provide a mesh then the grid size is not taken into account. So you can input any value. The mesh faces will not be subdivided.