Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve actually searched through that thread already, but unfortunately, the methods there don’t achieve the same results as the old shadow study component. I’m specifically trying to generate actual shadow geometries (as meshes). The closest suggestion was to use a direct sun study (No WIP Section in Ladybug tab - #2 by chris - ladybug-tools - Ladybug Tools | Forum). Even if I reduced the grid to really fine, it wouldn’t achieve the result. The alternative I’m looking for might not even need a Ladybug; I’m open to any alternative method.
Isn’t ladybug open source components? Meaning you can open up an older ladybug component and access the code? If so, I would open up the older version of LadyBug, grab the component code for the shadow 3D logic you want and then put that in a user object to be used in the newer version of LadyBug
Thanks for taking the time to help, @michaelvollrath; I really appreciate it! I hadn’t realised you could install legacy Ladybug components individually using the .ghuser file. I played around with it, and while it works with a few objects, it crashes when I add any complexity (which is expected given that it’s a discontinued legacy component).
What’s really cool, though, is that I can render the shadows cast on other objects, which is what I’m ultimately after. If this is achievable with complex objects, I can have shadows that can be baked as meshes or hatches (with the ladybug mesh-to-hatch component) and have sharp shadows and shades that can be exported as vectors. I’ve attached my test file to show what I mean.
While I haven’t made use of LadyBug much I bet that error is solvable with a little debugging and tracing back in the code.
An interesting use case to want to back the shadows as hatches. Seems pretty computationally heavy doing something that way.
Not sure how you feel about using additional plug ins but I wonder if leveraging GHGL for that to apply a hatch like shader for the shadows to the shadow mesh geometry could be more efficient?
