This house actually is already built (and its not quite so boring), but thats not the point here. The owner of said house was interested to know if the location (Bolton VT) would likely support the use of Solar Panels for domestic hot water and potentially some heating. The house is also located in valley, but generally has good southern and western exposure. So the task was simple, do a quick mock-up to get a sense of total sun exposure at the worst time of the year to validate what we intuitively suspected.
So how did I get 5 square miles into Vasari? Sketch-Up & Google Earth of course! At the scale I was operating at, Sketch-Up's rough approximation of terrain from Google Earth was more then sufficient, and Sketch-up's DWG export go us what we needed. I supposed if I was really enterprising I could've placed points on the intersections, then made splines, and then created smoother surface. But really, who has that kind of time!
Once I had my terrain a simple analysis confirmed what we were pretty sure we already knew... Plenty of sun in the afternoon, not much in the morning.
