Sun Tools

AUTO DESK - ECOTECT (Wiki)


A resource of reference and educational material on the environmental design and performance analysis of buildings.

http://squ1.org/wiki/Sun_Path_Diagram

Sun path diagrams are a convenient way of representing annual changes in the
path of the Sun through the sky within a single 2D diagram. Their most immediate
use is that the solar azimuth and altitude can be read off directly for any time
of the day and day of the year. They also provide a unique summary of solar
position that the designer can refer to when considering shading requirements
and design options.

PS: SketchUp Modeling.

Have you ever wondered how accurate the shading is within SketchUp?

This is what I did....

• I made a simple house in SU,
• I set up the Latitude and Longitude within SU to represent the area in which I live, Wellington, NZ and then added four scenes, and set the dates and times for each scene being midday 28Mar/28June/28Sep/28Sep.
• I then compared the angles shown on the sun dial charts and worked out the distance the shadow would cast at the above times using trig'.
• I then measured the angles and distances on the SU model at the variuos times to see if the results where the same as the sun dial charts.
• Believe it not the accuracy was down to 0.01mm, which was good enough for me. This was measured on each of the four days.
• If you decide to make your own, you can keep adding to it different times of the day (tip: add text layers to bring up the dates and times) and make a new scene, then save it as a template within SU eg: "Where I live"_Template.skp

Cheers....