As the questionmark in the title already indicates, I was not quite sure how to describe the phenomenon I’m now running into.
In short, I’m feeding a custom set of coordinates (determined using cnt and rcalc) to rtrace , which is then averaged using ‘total -m’ and then converted (partially) by rcalc. The context: I’m trying to calculate spherical illuminance (using a modified version of Greg’s example code from link: Spherical sensor).
As can be seen in the code below, the coordinates should result (in this example) in max 2 decimals behind the comma (or dot) and should take incremental steps of 0.1. However, for some reason, at the end of the chain when the coordinates are saved to the output, I get 10 decimals with an odd figure at the end. For example, one row of the output looks like: 0.0500000007 0.0500000007 0.550000012 478.717706 (which should have read 0.05 0.05 0.55 478.717706 - I dont mind the digits for the last one).
Now, my theory is that it might have something to do with the averaging step at the end. The averaging is setup so that every 10.000 rows of each column are average, which corresponds to the number of rays used per sampling point.
Now, for the code used: I use Python (on a linux cluster) to script, but I think its quite readable without python knowledge. For those unfamiliar with Python, the ‘os.system’ is simply the system call, and the ‘f’ before the radiance code indicates its an f-string which can contain variables, where each variable is enclosed in { } but refers to the variables set at the top of the code.
#room dimensions
room_x = 4
room_y = 2
room_z = 2
#number of rays per calculation point
N=10000
#distance between calculation points
deltax = 0.1
deltay = 0.1
deltaz = 0.1
#number of points in each direction (to feed into cnt)
ptx = room_x/deltax
pty = room_y/deltay
ptz = room_z/deltaz
os.system(f"cnt {ptx} {pty} {ptz} {N} | rcalc -of -e 'Dz=1-2*($1+rand(.77-.61*recno))/'{N} \
-e 'phi=2*PI*($1+rand(-.10+.39*recno))'/{N} \
-e 'rxy=sqrt(1-Dz*Dz);Dx=rxy*cos(phi);Dy=rxy*sin(phi)' \
-e '$1=$1*{deltax}+0.5*{deltax}; $2=$2*{deltay}+0.5*{deltay};$3=$3*{deltaz}+0.5*{deltaz};$4=Dx;$5=Dy;$6=Dz' \
| rtrace -n 10 -ff -ab 8 -aa 0.5 -h -oov scene.oct \
| total -if6 -{N} -m \
| rcalc -e '$1=$1;$2=$2;$3=$3;$4=179*4*PI*(.265*$4+.670*$5+.065*$6)'> output/multitest.dat")
Any thoughts why I get the 10 decimals, with odd figures?
