I needed to illustrate a radiometry concept recently, but I didn’t want to draw it manually with Adobe Illustrator or whatever. I was afraid that parts of the diagram wouldn’t look to-scale, and I was especially worried that if I had to show the diagram from multiple angles, that proportions wouldn’t line up exactly. I’m also pedantic and meticulous (read OCD).
My inspiration for the diagram I needed was very similar to Pat Hanrahan‘s class notes. I found this picture online (I never went to Stanford):
I first searched for some graphics libraries to help me quickly generate these, but I didn’t find a solution that I was happy with. I’m sure you can generate a graphic like that with many solutions to be honest, but the few I tried seemed to be overly-complicated. I wanted clean, wireframe diagrams w/ label support for drawing simple vector, polar, conical, and hemispherical primitives on a white background.
Because I have some parametric design experience, I ended up trying it in Grasshopper and Rhino. This way I could specify exactly what I wanted simply, and also have the ability to modify it easily. Here is what it looks like in Grasshopper/Rhino:
Here is the final resulting figure:
I also put the files on GitHub if you’d like to use them or contribute to a library:
https://github.com/delrocco/diagram-radiometry