I'm a researcher interested into radio channel modeling and I'm currently working with a custom-built ray-tracer for such purpose. I would like, though, to have better performance, e.g., using GPU accelerated ray-tracing, which is not trivial to program from scratch.
I was wondering whether I could do this with pre-existing open source (optical) ray-tracing software such as Blender. For this to work, I would need to
- Define transmitters (TXs) and receivers (RXs) nodes. I guess TXs are equivalent to light sources and RXs to cameras, but I would need 360° cameras. Also, TXs and RXs should be points with no size
- Obtain output files containing information about every single received ray, such as traveled distance/delay, received power, angles of departure and arrival
- Possibly, access to the render engine programmatically based on a pre-built Blender CAD scene
- Ideally, create an interface (an add-on?) specifically for RF ray-tracing and make it available to the community which allows the complete workflow to stay on Blender, i.e., (i) scene creation, (ii) material settings, (iii) RX/TX positioning (possibly moving), (iv) ray-tracing computation, (v) ray visualization.
I have no idea whether this is even possible, I'm asking the Blender community for a feedback on whether these few points could be more or less easily obtained.
If not directly from Blender's render engine, maybe some other open engine one such as Lux Core Render, POV-Ray, etc.
Your opinion will be greatly appreciated