this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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I totally get your point as to how it may be faster. Let me read up about ambient occlusion and since I've never worked with Houdini, whether I can implement the same using any of the tools that I'm conversant with. Thank you for making me aware of this.
Pretty sure Blender has a Python API. And AO research on its own probably won't yield much juice for what I described. The topic of limiting the scope of AO calculations to calculate other things is kinda not a thing. I actually used it as the subject of my Master's thesis. I was using it to calculate the exposure of scenes to the solar ecliptic throughout the year so I could calculate fading from direct sun exposure on textures. That is why I shared a step-by-step instead of a link. The principle for what you want to do is the same though. Measuring the exposure of geometry against some other geometry.
From what I just read, you want to use the Scene.ray_cast() function. Usage should be straightforward.
That should be enough to get you started. I am 99% unfamiliar with the Blender Python API, but this should get you there if you are even remotely experienced with it. There are obviously optimizations that can be done as this is very brute force, I was just trying to illustrate the basic loop.
Thank you, I'll explore along these lines.
I would be very curious to know what you come up with.
Currently, I'm trying to find a lazy (for me) way out. I'm learning to bake the lighting on objects and figuring out ways to iteratively do it for all objects of choice (buildings) in a scene automatically. Thereafter, i hope to do image processing on the unwrapped light baking maps to detect the desired colors. It should be possible to crop these images to detect light on individual faces and or find the percentage of area exposed too.
If this does not work out, I'll take the progressively difficult ways suggested in the thread as I learn and become comfortable with what you guys have kindly given me pointers for.