Problem
Environmental simulation tools like Ladybug are powerful but need specialist knowledge, a Rhino/Grasshopper setup and time. Most early-stage questions are much simpler: where does the sun hit at 3pm in December, which facade is overexposed, does option B shade the neighbour. Architects, and especially clients, have no easy way to check that without someone running a separate workflow.
Proposed solution
Simple analyses inside the viewer with sensible defaults:
- Pick a location (map or city search) and set true north
- Sun position and shadows for any date and time, with a slider to scrub through a day or a year
- Cumulative solar exposure on selected surfaces for a chosen period, shown as a colour map with a legend
- Later, if feasible: basic daylight and wind. These need real solvers, so they’d probably run in the cloud rather than client-side and should be treated as a second phase
Use case
Early-stage checks and client conversations. Load two design options, run the same sun study on both, save the views, share one link. The client sees the difference without anyone explaining what a radiation map is.
Additional context
Keep it minimal: few inputs, clear visuals, plain metrics (hours of sun, kWh/m², percentage shaded) and an “advanced” panel for people who want to change sky model or grid size. Since we can already stream Grasshopper to the viewer, one path is to prototype the heavier analyses as gh-bridge scripts first and only bake them in if people use them.
If this would be useful to you, reply with which analysis you’d run most. Sun/shadow is realistic short-term; daylight and wind depend on demand.