A 3d modelling question

[aexley]

This probably isn't the right forum but as I'm a bit stuck I hope someone can help.

I work in the lightning protection industry and one of the systems that can be used to determine how much or little lightning protection a building needs is the 'rolling sphere method' in which an imaginary sphere is rolled over the building in question. Unfortunatley this is very difficult to do on a 2d plan drawing.

I'm doing some exploratory work and attempting to find out how difficult it would be to design and use a 3d modelling program to input basic shapes of buildings (most are various groups of rectangles) and determining where Lightning Protection is needed using the rolling sphere method.

As far as I know there isn't any currently available package that could do this. If any of you know of such a package or quite how difficult it would be to design one from scratch please leave your comments.

Thanks in advance.

aexley

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[RichardF]

exactly how does the rolling sphere method work ?

 

[aexley]

Quite literally as it sounds. A large, usually 60m diameter, sphere is rolled over the building and where it touches are the points at which lightning protection is required. The reason for the sphere and it's size are technical issues and pretty dry stuff. It's all to do with how a lightning strike is formed.

 

[DarrenWard]

I have done something before that could be easily adapted for this.

I work for a lighting company, and a few years a go I wrote an exterior floodlighting program that allowed you to draw in your floor plan and assign height to each building. The program then gave a 3D picture of the building and the floodlights in place and the lighting effect that would be achieved when the lights were on.

You could use the building stuff, and then rotate the building 360º applying a semi circle and calculate the amount of builing that falls above the line.

I have still got some of the original codethat I did from home somewhere, if you drop me your details I would be happy to dig it out and give you a hand to finish it.

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