Solis

Solis (latin : sun) is a plugin for CloudCompare to calculate solar irradiance on pointcloud and meshes. It is based on the qPCV plugin in CloudCompare and uses the a C implementation of the solrad functions to calculate solar radiation and related variables based on location and time.

Install Solis in CloudCompare

The plugin is not (yet) made available as compiled plugin .dll that can be added to already installed versions of CloudCompare. To compile it,

• clone CloudCompare from https://github.com/CloudCompare/CloudCompare
• follow the instructions to compile CloudCompare here
• clone this repository in the CloudCompare/plugins/3rdparty directory
• re-run CloudCompare's cmake
• turn on PLUGIN_3RDPARTY_QSOLIS in your cmake options
• build CloudCompare

Use Solis in CloudCompare

The plugin is available through the GUI in >Plugins

The plugin can also be accessed through the CloudCompare commandline:

Command

Description

-SOLIS

Runs the SOLIS plugin Optional settings are: -TYPE [value]: one of 'DIRECT' 'DIFFUSE' 'ALL' -LAT [value]: latitude (degree N) -LON [value]: longitude (degree E) -ELV [value]: elevation (m) -DOY [value]: Doy of Year (with fractional time) -INT [value]: Integrate over x hours (hours). Set to -1 for single timepoint -TS [value]: Timestep for calculation of sun position (minutes) -NRAYS [value]: number of rays for diffuse light calculations -TYPE [value]: one of 'DIRECT', 'DIFFUSE' or 'ALL' -IS_CLOSED: Tells SOLIS that the mesh is watertight. This accelerates processing. -RESOLUTION [value]: OpenGL context resolution