Hello fellow raytracers,
I have what I believe to be a rather oblique question. I've used Radmap
before, to get estimations on PV array feasibility. However, I was
recently asked about the feasibility of landscaping in a dense urban
environment. After a lot of searching, I could not find what I had hoped
to find - a categorical list of what grows given a quantity of light, in
terms of light energy, light power*time, illuminance*time, or something
along those lines. I'm left with finding spaces with similar geometry
and determining what is growing and what is not. The only reference I
could find with respect to Radiance was from 1995, with Greg suggesting
that replacing the RGB channels with some quantities that were better
suited to the response of plants. I know it's a stretch to hope that
there are any horticulturists on the list, but has anybody else come
across information or situations involving photosynthetically active
radiation? Any insight is appreciated.
Also, I use Linux on a VirtualPC (Microsoft freeware) in Windows
(Intel). It's sort of like VMWare where a computer is virtualized and
simulated in a "sandbox". It's a clumsy and resource hogging amalgam,
but does let you play around with some of the more fun features of the
*nix versions without a whole lot of hardware and setup hassle. cat
/proc/cpuinfo gives the specs of the main processor, so I wonder what
happens when you run it on a VirtualPC/AMD combination...
--Dave Smith
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Hi David.
Virtual PC by Microsoft is as far as I know a pure software
simulation of a PC that predates the hardware support that's
built into new Intel/AMD chips. It's clumsy and resource hogging
because it simulates an entire PC instead of sharing the hardware
between two operating systems as VMware or Parallels on Mac
does.
If you're looking for a faster and free alternative you can
google for Xen (which has the Linux setup hassle mentioned
above) or VirtualBox (Sun freeware).
On the subject of CPU type it should not matter much which
CPU you are running on. You will get the better performance
out of the CPU that's supported better by your virtualisation
software. In the case of Virtual PC I'd guess it makes no
difference at all.
Regards,
Thomas
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On 1 Jul 2008, at 14:19, David Smith wrote:
Also, I use Linux on a VirtualPC (Microsoft freeware) in Windows
(Intel). It's sort of like VMWare where a computer is virtualized and
simulated in a "sandbox". It's a clumsy and resource hogging amalgam,
but does let you play around with some of the more fun features of the
*nix versions without a whole lot of hardware and setup hassle. cat
/proc/cpuinfo gives the specs of the main processor, so I wonder what
happens when you run it on a VirtualPC/AMD combination...
environment. After a lot of searching, I could not find what I had hoped
to find - a categorical list of what grows given a quantity of light, in
terms of light energy, light power*time, illuminance*time, or something
along those lines. I'm left with finding spaces with similar geometry
and determining what is growing and what is not.
This sounds really exciting what you are trying to do there. However, as it seams to be related to climate, not only illumination, I really wonder if a more general simulation tool such as esp-r could be used here. To decide what grows where, assumptions of temperature, humidity, air flows would be important too. So you would get a climate profile of a location from a simulation run and could try to find suitable vegetation according to that. I know of lists of plants used e.g. in parks, public spaces and gardens, showing basic requirements, but nothing in terms of physical units. So I guess this is something that would have to be started yet... I am very curious about what you are doing, and will try to get some details from a friend who is in botanics.
CU Lars.