I was sure this series was finished – as indicated in the last post which talked about both VASA’s pathfinding and visibility from a point inside Forma, after having talked about a manual approach for connecting the two tools – but I did leave the door ajar to me finding something else to talk about on this topic.
Sure enough, I got thinking about the missing “big ticket” item that VASA is able to implement with relatively low effort: visibility from a direction (as opposed to from a point) which can simulate things like shadows cast by direct sunlight.
It was indeed quick to implement, and it was a helpful process as it reminded me of one of the key values of voxelisation: you can adjust the resolution of the voxel model to match the performance and quality required. While for pathfinding and visibility from a point we wanted to voxelise our neighbourhood-scale model at quite a granular resolution (with a 1m voxel size), for visibility from a direction with good enough…