This is just a little addon for an addon! It adds a new command to the Scenario Editor in TurboCADs Animation Lab v3.1

The new command, SPMoveSun, allows you to easily control the position of a TC Light based on where the sun would be at a given time and place. In this way you can use TC/Anilab to produce either full day and/or full year simulations for a given site/time period.

Example Animations (Click thumbnails to play movies. These all look best if you set your Media Player to Repeat mode.)

Click picture for the 800x600 version of the movie (2 Mb). Or here for the 640x480 version (1.2 Mb).

Room with glass ceiling, New Years Day. (2Mb) Latitude 26°S, 1st January, 6:00am - 6:00pm This simulation shows a full day in five minute steps in order to get a smooth animation. The room pictured has a roughly south-easterly view. There are four lights in this model - Ambient & Headlight (both quite low), and two Directional lights both following the same 'Sun path'. The stronger of the two directional lights casts soft edged shadows to provide overal modelling, and the second sharp-edged light gives a clue to the exact position of the sun. I found using two 'suns' like this gave a more pleasing effect than either of them on their own. In addition to moving the lights, to add realism, the lights are turned down at the start & end of the day using the LightColor command. Also both the background picture & cloud environment are darkened and reddened using ChangeMaterial and ChangeEnvironment respectively.

Modelling Light Interception using StepRadiosityFalse materials (900Kb) This movie demostrates using RadiosityStepFalse reflection in materials, to get an indication of light intensity falling on a object - in this case to help visualise light interception and distribution within an orchard. The trees are created as a TurboCAD Block, so the configuration of the orchard can be quickly changed by using Edit Content. RadiosityStepFalse paints the object in a series of ten false colours depending on the intensity of light falling upon them. So in this movie Red indicates full sun through to Blue indicating deep shade. More details about this material can be found in Henry O Hubbich's book on materials. I am still working on this project. Next stage is to model canopy density which will be done by editing the tree material. Then finally I would like to calculate the meaning of the false colours in real-world units.

Compatibility