Urban Solar Carver

GPU-accelerated generation of maximum developable building volumes that protect solar and daylight access in urban environments.

USC follows a subtractive logic: a theoretical maximum volume is progressively carved by casting rays from protected surfaces toward the sky, removing voxels that obstruct solar/daylight access beyond a configurable threshold.

Overview

• 6 carving modes covering solar access, passive heating, daylighting, and radiative cooling
• 3-stage pipeline (preprocessing, thresholding, exporting) -- each stage independently re-runnable
• GPU-accelerated ray tracing via NVIDIA Warp (DDA kernel), with CPU fallback
• Grasshopper plugin (15 components) for Rhino 3D integration
• Python API, CLI, and Jupyter notebooks

Pipeline

Input (PLY meshes, EPW weather, YAML config)
    |
    v
Preprocessing ── scores.npy, voxel_grid.npy
    |
    v
Thresholding ─── mask.npy (binary carving mask)
    |
    v
Exporting ────── carved_mesh.ply

Each stage reads the previous stage's manifest, so you can re-run thresholding with different parameters without re-computing scores.

Documentation

• Getting Started
  • Installation -- setup via setup_env.py or manual install
  • Quick Start -- Python API, CLI, and notebook tutorials
  • Configuration -- YAML config reference with per-mode examples
• Carving Modes -- the 6 analysis modes explained (tilted_plane, time-based, irradiance, benefit, daylight, radiative_cooling)
• Grasshopper Plugin -- Rhino 3D integration, component list, daemon setup
• Project Map -- every file and directory in the repository
• API Reference -- full function signatures, parameters, and return types (auto-generated from docstrings)
• Changelog