Questions about hb-radiance view-based workflow to retrieve glare source locations

Dear community,

I am doing research on locating glare sources using HB PIT view-based workflow to create HDR images and retrieve glare directions(x,y,z) using findglare or evalglare.

I encountered some problems when doing it and really need your advice.

My goal is to retrieve hour-by-hour glare directions in a space, which needs tons of HDR images. I tried to script HB view-based workflow through python script outside the grasshopper environment using HB SDK and CLI. Then, I attempted to loop for just one week. It worked but the runtime is pretty slow. I know that annual PIT view based simulation is nearly impossible but I found AcceleRad created by Nathaniel, which can run rpict using GPU. This may save a lot of time and I want to give it a try by combining HB-radiance. I am not sure if the latest PIT image based sim conponment in gh already used AcceleRad. From my trials, the runtime of accelerad_rpict CLI is faster than honeybee-radiance rpict CLI.

There are 2 methods I can think of so far:

  1. modify HB view-based recipe (which is really hard for me) using rpict GPU
  2. use HBModelToRadFolder to export scene.rad and aperture.rad → oconv (sky.mat, sky.rad, material.rad, scene.rad, aperture.rad) into scene.oct → accelerad-rpict view.vf scene.oct)

I guess the method 2 is more promising, but I have several things I am not sure of.

I found that HBModelToRadFolder only exports geometries without material.rad and sky.rad/mat.
So alternatively, I will try to use CLI as follows:

  • export objs:
    honeybee-radiance translate model-to-rad [OPTIONS] MODEL_FILE

  • export materials:
    honeybee-radiance translate modifiers-to-rad [OPTIONS] MODIFIER_JSON

  • create sky:
    honeybee-radiance sky cie [OPTIONS] [DAY] [MONTH] [TIME]

and then this workflow could work?
(updates: I just found material.mad in the output folder, sorry)

I also looked at some posts in the forum to talk about matrix-based simulation which is fast, but I guess I cannot skip the step of rendering HDR images coz findglare and evalglare needs HDR as an input.

Sorry for this long post but I would be really thankful that you professional guys could offer me some suggestions on if it is doable or there are other ways to handle(like pollination can do this easier?). I know the primary radiance worlflow (gensky, …) might be more straightforwad but I still want to stick to honeybee since it is interacting with Rhino.

Many thanks in advance!
Shin

Hi @zzzX, You can replace the radiance executors with the ones from Accelerad. And the rest should work as-is.