Sun Shadow Frequency - General questions
Hello Lena,
Sorry, I'm maybe late but I was working with this tool recently and I had the same questions, I suppose you're working on urban heat islands ? 😉
The output of this tool is a raster where the value of each cell corresponds to the number of time where the cell isn't exposed with a direct sight line to the sun (it corresponds in your case to being in the shade)
For example, I started the geoprocessing with my 3D model for a whole day of summer with a time interval of 1 hour, the day has 15 hours from the dawn to dusk so my output values i between 0 and 15 where :
0 : the cell is constantly exposed to the sun (15 hours of exposition) (very warm red in my capture)
15 : the cell is never exposed directly to the sun (refreshingly blue in my capture)
for example, here the variables I'm using :
With the daylight Saving time box checked, the tool knows the time of sunshine at this date so it makes only 15 iterations despite the fact that I launched the tool from 01:00 to 23:00 for august 1st with a 1 hour interval (22 iterations).
Warning, the process could be very long depending of the number of 3D object, the cell size of output raster and the number of iterations you're asking for.
I hope It could help you
Cheers,
Rémi
Hi !
You can add multiple inputs in the geoprocessing tool as long as they're multipatch feature class.
But the more objects, the longer the calculation time....so it will be a problem for you apparently.
I checked the tool and unfortunately, it's not very well optimized. Sun shadows frequency can't use GPU and it can only use mono-thread CPU calculation power.
What I did was segmented my input datas and I launched several instances of the tool at the same time.
For example, if you want to make a simulation for a whole day, you can launch several instances of ArcGIS Pro as your CPU and RAM allows (or by script, it was what I did) and start the geoprocessing tool with different time interval (00:00-01:00; 01:00-02:00; 02:00-03:00;....)
If you lauch the tool on a whole day of summer per hour, you can (virtually, depending of you computer) divide the time it will take by 15 😉
After that, you can do a simple raster calculation at the end with all ouptut rasters.
Hope it could help !
Rémi
Hello community!
I'm trying to use the tool, but the Input Features already returns an error.
My features are polygons and I've already made sure it's a Feature Layer. I tried Polygon Z, Polygon and Polygon ZM, none of them worked. What am I doing wrong?
