skylighting-web-app

My thesis code for the MSc in AUEB (Athen University of Economics and Business)

Abstract

In this thesis we study and briefly examine different skylight models that have been proposed by the scientific community and we analyze a more recent one which provides an analytic model for full-Spectral Sky-Dome Radiance. This model is used to implement a web-based application which takes input from the user and draws a scene on a canvas element using the JavaScript 3D library three.js. This scene includes a basic 3D-model, a ground plane, the sky Dome, the Sun and the light sources that represent the radiance of the sky. A full explanation is provided for the source code and the functionality of each component of the Web-application as well as some screenshots of the scene, showing different instances of the sky dome and the 3D-model while changing the turbidity, the ground albedo value as well as the solar elevation.

Install and Run

The following installation is based on the web-server Apache 2.4.18 and PHP 7.0.30.

• Copy the skymodel directory to /var/www/html
• Create the dome_points executable by running inside the dome_points directory:

gcc -std=c99 dome_points.c ArHosekSkyModel.c -o dome_points -lm
cp dome_points /var/www/html/skymodel/

• Browse to http://localhost/skymodel/skydome.html

Notes

• The Demo function re-draws the scene every second (bad practice :) and since the loading of some 3D models takes more than 4 secs (the dinosaur for example), you will see nothing more than black screen on these occasions (more info on the document).
• The code the loads the models and the ground material is very old and sometimes it doesn't show what is expected to, after I upgraded the three.js library to the $94$ version.