Hi,

I am considering to dig into PovRay, if it can do what I need - so I hope
that someone of you can tell me whether it will:

A light source (the sun) shines on a reflecting surface (say, a
square-shaped mirror that is hanging on a wall). As the sunlight comes from
above and shines onto the mirror, part of the sunlight is reflected
downwards to the floor. Thus, a basically parallelogram-shaped lighter area
should be visible on the floor.

I then would like to determine when (date and time of the day) the reflected
sunlight falls on a certain area of the floor (or objects). It need not be a
realistic rendering - I just want to determine the days in the year when the
reflected sunlight hits an object that sits on the floor.

To my understanding, this should be possible by using photon mapping, and
then trying to make a fast-motion video from it. Is that correct, and is it
feasable for, say, a hobby programmer to do this within two working weeks?

(Is there some module or code-snippet for automatically calculating the
sun's position, given geographical position and date/time?)


Many thanks!
Philipp

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