EDIT: Both Terrain shading mask and Horizon angles components are now part of Gismo plugin. For future suggestions, issues, bugs, post a question in Gismo’ plugin group.
Hello,
I would just like to make a modest notice about the two new Ladybug components, one of which creates a 3d terrain shading mask and another one which visualizes and exports horizon angles.
A terrain shading mask is essentially a diagram which maps the silhouette of the surrounding terrain (hills, valleys, mountains, tree tops…) around the chosen location, and account for the shading losses from the terrain.
It can be used as a context_ input in mountainous or higher latitude regions for any kind of sun related analysis: sunlight hours analysis, solar radiation analysis, view analysis, photovoltaics/solar water heating sunpath shading…
My home town is an example of the shading caused by the terrain. Here is how it looks from the tallest building in the town:
And the created terrain shading mask:
A mask for any land location up to 60 degrees North can be created:
There will also be a support for a few major cities above this limit.
Both Terrain shading mask and Horizon angles components can be downloaded from here.
An example .gh file can be found in here.
Component will prompt the user to download and copy certain files in order to be able to run.
It was created with assistance from Dr. Bojan Savric.
Support on various issues was further given by:
Dr. Graham Dawson, Dr. Alec Bennett, Dr. Ulrich Deuschle, Andrew T. Young, LiMinlu, Jonathan de Ferranti, Michal Migurski, Christopher Crosby, Even Rouault, Tamas Szekeres, Izabela Spasic, Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari, Dragan Milenkovic, Chen Weiqing, Menno Deij-van Rijswijk and gis.stackexchange.com community.
I hope somebody might find the components useful.