calculation of insolation of buildings, solar radiation of buildings

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Hello everybody! My task is to calculate the Solar radiation of buildings, that is, how many hours a day the facades of buildings receive the sun. I have a fully implemented project on Unity, but I need to implement it all inside the Unreal Engine. In unity, I create a building and divide it into separate parts - facades, which are squares of the same size and a ray is created from the center of these squares to the sun and if the ray does not intersect with anything, then the facade gets 1 hour of sun and so every day is calculated in March and October (Standard calculation solar radiation) and then the average value is taken, which shows in color how many hours per day the facade of the building receives the sun on average per year, I will try to attach the video.
Vids from Unity Insolation - Google Drive

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Cool project. What’s the grand scope here? Are we doing a handful of buildings? Or are we doing an entire city? Any specific questions?

Things to look into when figuring out the approach:

  • ISM - Instanced Static Mesh components to represent a facade
  • Per Instance Custom Data to colour them and keep performance high (if you’re doing a city block, you may want to opt for the hierarchical variant of ISMs)
  • actor Construction Script + 2D Grid Execution Macro will allow you to rapidly build the ISM facades; automate the process by sampling the underlying building’s transform
  • raycasts are called Line Traces in UE
  • SkyLight could be used to represent the sun
  • prototype the thing in blueprints
  • optionally, move the line tracing loop and math to C++
  • the math itself you already have, surely; doing it in BP can be a royal pain the neck due to the nature of wires and how much screen space it takes. There’s a bunch of helper nodes and the Math Expression, though.

General help you might be interested in:

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Good evening! Thank you very much for your interest and response. This project involves the development of individual areas within the urban environment, so insolation will be calculated for buildings generated using PCG in a specific area. Thank you again for your response, my team and I will familiarize ourselves with this material. All the best!

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