I’m building a tiny web app that lets you rough in a massing and see hourly daylight shifts over a site in under 30 seconds, using Ladybug Tools data and three presets. I’d love to sanity‑check the interaction with anyone teaching first-year studios — would this help desk crits, or do you need different outputs?
Could you add a one‑click ‘9–12–3’ PNG strip export and a solstice/equinox toggle so we can pin up fast during crits? The ‘three presets’ idea is great, but a simple sunlit‑hours heatmap on the ground (say, >2 hrs) would help first‑years compare massings without math — like a weather app for the site. If it also handles quick context blocks, it’s ready for desk crits.
A quick ‘≥3h sun’ false‑color overlay on the ground plane — like a heatmap sticker you can slap on a plan — would help first‑years read massing moves at a glance, and a scrubber to drag through hours might beat a static strip in crits, @noah16’s export idea aside. If we can set the threshold (2h/4h) and pin the overlay to a saved view, desk crits go smoother. Would you also consider a simple section probe that projects sun‑hours onto a site section for pinups?
And one thing I’d love is a ‘context mass’ slider that grows a perimeter ring of generic buildings (say 10–30 m) so you can test overshadowing without modeling neighbors — like sun topography for a block. A tiny hover readout for altitude/azimuth would tie the sketch to the sun-path without bloating the UI. If it can stay “under 30 seconds” with a street‑width or FAR seed, that’d be perfect.