Section Two: Sun Shadow Volume Analysis
Introduction
Shadow analysis is a tool that allows you to analyze daylight conditions by giving a certain date and time. It can be hourly analysis between sunrise and sunset or the changes in shadows at a certain time during different dates. It is a useful tool for building design and understanding the sun’s path in a given coordinate. Assume that you are a designer and you would like to design a high-performance building that its source of energy is solar. Also, the sun position and movement across your site play an important role in your design to benefit from the daylighting.
The most important questions would be how much does a building shade the surrounding area and how much does the surrounding area, such as buildings and trees, shade a building? It is obvious that trees’ shadows are desirable in summer and very important in cooling the environment, whereas in the winter the important factor in the environment is the shade created by buildings.
In this section, you will carry out the sun shadow analysis from sunrise to sunset in winter (January 1st, 2021). If you are interested you can carry out another analysis for summer (July 1st, 2021) to compare the results. Creating the shadow volumes, you will learn how to animate the shadow volumes that you have created.