Hi. I would like to use a ray tracing engine to compute the blockage of an
antenna aperture as I rotate the aperture in azimuth and elevation. I was
curious if POV-ray would be a good tool for this application. Details of my
problem are as follows:

I would like to compute the percent of blockage for a circular antenna
aperture located on an airplane. My approach is to launch evenly spaced
rays from the aperture and monitor each ray to determine if it intersects a
surface or escapes to the problem boundary. I am not interested in any type
of multipath (simply blocked or not blocked). I compute the percent
blockage by dividing the total number of rays that intersect a surface by
the total number of rays launched. I need to rotate the aperture in azimuth
and elevation and repeat the process. Additionally, I would like to write
the blockage information to an output file.

I have worked with ray tracing engines before and I know that I can solve
this sort of problem with ray tracing. The problem is that I do not have
access to the engines I worked with in the past. So, I am curious if
POV-ray can solve my problem. I quickly looked through the pov-ray
documentation and it appears that some of the capabilities I need are
present. Before I spend time investigating the capabilities (which I think
is going to take a bit of time) I was curious if anyone could provide me
with a quick answer.

Thank you in advance for any information.

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