Hello community
I'd like to better understand the direct solar component (CdsSun) in the 5 phase calculation. I doing this partly for interest and partly to see if there is a work around for MS Windows users to improve the sun position accuracy - limited to 145 sun positions questions the worth of making a 5 phase analysis.
My first question is:
Following Andrew McNeil's 5 phase tutorial, the script makes 5185 sun patches. When I look at the sunpatch file, all suns use the same material being "void light solar 0 0 3 1e6 1e6 1e6". If all suns use the same material how is impact of cloud cover (from the EPW file) factored in the intensity of the suns' and how is aresuns' intensity factored relative to its height in the sky? Is a correction happening via the reinhart.cal argument in rcontrib?
My second question is:
I was thinking that rather than use rcontrib, I could I produce the direct sun component (CdsSun) for the 5 phases separately using rpict. I could write a python script that renders the suns direct contribution for 8760 hours of the year then continue the standard 5 phase methodology. My first thoughts are that (providing the script cleans up after itself) this feasible and would take a similar amount of time. I can make sun only perez skies via genskymtx. Am I being naive here?
Finally - a suggestion for development. Do the radiance developers know you can easily increase the number of sun positions on windows 10 machines to 1297 (MF:3) via the command "_setmaxstudio". If you inbed this function (with appropriate syntax) in the rcontrib.exe script you can reset the maximum number open files to 2048. I've done it and it seems to work ok.
Thanks for any comments / help
