A friend of mine has to calculate the areas of shadow cast from his buildings for a rather large built project (approximately 17k hectares). We've had a look at a variety of tools and it seems to me that Infraworks is the right tool, but how to get to the information without manually drawing coverage areas traced over the shadows.
Is there a way to reach into the API and calculate this shadow area information.
If there's any way to do it, most likely it would have to be some custom programming via the API as you mentioned. There's no way to get it out of the box (at least, that I'm aware of).
Curious though, it's an interesting requirement. Any idea why this is being required/requested? Is it for a specific day and time or averages over the year? Averages at a specific time over the year?
I have software that will do what you want in short order but it is very expensive (PCI Geomatica => FOCUS module => Object based image analysis).
What you want to search for is image segmentation software in the public domain. The software I use performs image segmentation using what is call the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm (very accurate).
What you shared is a lot about image processing, I am not looking for that. I have no idea how to code nor anything about image processing.
Simply put my problem is a geometric calculations, for instance based on the sun azimuth and altitude angles I can work out the shadow on a surface using just basic trignometry using pen and paper. Now imagine having been given a building with 'n' sides and 'x' different sun position, I want to know the shadow area on each 'n' surfaces for each 'x' time.
Did you follow?
This is what I want, I cannot get images for each surface and have an external program calculate the area.
Yes this is what I am looking for, but my shape is complicated and the sun is moving across the sky. This means I will need to do that math for each surface at each hour, how can I do that? Any program or software which can calculate that for me?
It would be good to hear from someone on the Dev' team.
It is undoubtedly something IW360 'would' be capable of, as it already does it graphically...
Ideally it 'could' be a 'terrain theme' binary in nature, whether it is in Shade or SunLight, and an option to 'Generate Shade Coverage Areas' that can be queried / reported out.
Take that a step further and they could be captured as 'dynamic' coverage areas to capture multiple time-steps and use in storyboards, reports over time etc...
These types of assessment and often carried out through the planning phases of projects.
We use 12d Model to run our solar analysis, and any view-shed type analysis's.
so just read that you were able to calculate area (meters or in acres if needed of a shadow )
I was wondering if you were able to calculate and shadow area of a solar panel assembly of 200 feet tall by 800 feet long which would be created close to the 49 parallel in North west territories or there about
