"Trevor G Quayle" <Tin### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> "Philipp" <pov### [at] phipracom> wrote:
[...]
> Assuming you know the position of the sun and the plane of the mirror, you
> would just mirror the sun's position relative to the mirror surface,
> creating a virtual sun.  Then you can use the projected_through option for
> the virtual sun using the mirror surface as the projected_through object.
>
> This may take a little bit more mathematics, but would save considerably on
> render time.
>

Hi, thanks Warp and Trevor for your responses;

Well, I had simplified the problem a bit.
Actually there are some other objects in the scene, which will be partly
between the sun and the mirror, and also between the mirror and the
"detector object" (I call it like that for now, it is the object that sits
on the floor, waiting to to get hit by reflected sunlight). So this makes
Trevor's "virtual sun" approach more complicated, though this would be a
good idea. The other objects in the scene are quite simple (flat surfaces,
no transparencies).

In fact, I would rather prefer simple programming over little rendering
time, because I have little experience with povray, this is probably a
one-time job, and I want to reduce the risk of program bugs. (So no matter
if rendering takes 3 days in total. :-)

Basically, I want a means to determine when the "detector object" is hit by
the sunlight. I thought about only calculating / drawing it in CAD, but
obviously it is nice to have some visual plausibility check, and a few good
pictures to show.
So I thought I could make a video of one (half?) simulated year, say, at one
frame per hour, and then watch the video (say, 3 secondes per frame) to see
what happens; ...and to find the date/time of critical situations (assuming
a visible date-timeline in the video, hmmmm...).

Regards,
Philipp

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