Radiation reflection concentration from curved mirror / HB 1.3 -1.4

Has anybody tried to compute reflections from curved glass surfaces using, forward ray-tracing to figure out that radiation concentration? All the examples I found are using the older versions of Honeybee and radiance materials. With the new version of HB 1.3.0 and 1.4.0 the same workflows don’t work, and components are named differently. Any comment or example script you could share will be welcome.

Thanks!

OPT4_MirrorMaterial_Ref1

In LBT, ray-tracing simulation is not implemented; But you can simulate the focus of light on surfaces through its HB Annual Irradiance component, and also with component HB Point-In-Time View-Based, you can simulate it such false-color

Thanks Aliarch,
will have a look at it

cheers

That’s mostly correct, @Aliarch , but I would just note that the Annual Irradiance recipe isn’t really the best for studying direct-reflected solar. That recipe does a good job modeling the (no bounce) direct part of the sun but the direct-reflected portion is kinda “washed out” across several sky patches so it’s probably not the best for studying this case.

You have the right idea with the Point-in-time recipes, though. Both the Point-In-Time View-Based recipe and the Point-in-Time Grid-Based recipes are capable of modeling the direct-reflection to a high level of accuracy.

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Hello @chris,

I’m also trying to study this topic and found the old topic in forum:

In this topic, man should manually add specific items to library and find “hot spot”. It can be realized in legacy version but missed in LBT. Would you please tell me how to add material to library in LBT?

Thanks in advance!

Hey @YZZhang ,

There are a couple of ways that you can create higly customized modifiers like this in the LBT Plugin. The simplest is just to drop the following .mat file into the following location:

special_mods.mat (214 Bytes)

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\ladybug_tools\resources\standards\honeybee_standards\modifiers

The next time that you start up Rhino, you’ll see a glass_mat modifier in your library that you can apply to any Honeybee geometry just using the glass_mat identifier.

image

The modifier that’s loaded into the library will includes all of the dependencies noted in the .mat file, which control its reflection properties.

There are also ways of doing this entirely inside a GHPython component using the a few lines of Python with the LBT SDK. Using these would allow you to make modifiers like this that work on the machines of other people (without needing other people to drop that .mat file into their standards folder). But I’ll only get into those if you have some Python experience and want to know them.

Thank you so much! @chris

Hello @chris

I’ve retested based on the method you provide, thank you very much! However, there occurs something wrong with the simulation. The screenshots and log are shown below:



Would you please take a moment to check it? Thank you!

@YZZhang ,

That error doesn’t seem to be related to the rest of the discussion. From the message in the logs, it looks like you have this character somewhere in your radiance files or the simulation file paths:

Finding and removing that should get it all to work.

Hello @chris ,

I’ve installed LBT1.5.0 through Pollination Grasshopper installer, but failed to set specfic item to library.

There are no modifier folder in “C:\Program Files\ladybug_tools\resources\standards\honeybee_standards”

How can I add the material in LBT1.5.0? Thank in advance!

Hi @YZZhang,

Try C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\ladybug_tools\standards\modifiers.

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Thank you @mikkel , it works!

Yes, sorry that we moved the location of the user standards in the last few months to the location @mikkel mentioned. With the new location, your standards won’t be overwritten with each uninstall/reinstall.