Glossary

This glossary contains some terms that are commonly used throughout the documentation.

General

Slab simulation

Slab simulation is the low level simulation of HyperBlend that represents a homogeneous slab of translucent material.

In the context of plant simulation, a slab would represent a single leaf. In other simulation context it might represent a slab of water full of microalgae as in [RLC+25].

Solver

Slab simulation solver which in code has a name: opt (optimization based), original solver, which is accurate but very slow. nn (neural network), which is fast (200 times faster than opt) with good accuracy (decrease of 2-4 times compared to opt). surf (surface fitting), which is worse than nn in accuracy but around the same speed.

Signal

Signal is a pair of reflectance and transmittance spectra in the Slab simulation. In forestry application the signal is reflectance and transmittance of a single leaf. Signals can originate from real world measurements or they can be simulated with the integrated PROSPECT [FGNJ17] leaf spectral simulator. In slab simulation, the signal is initially called Target signal. The point of the slab simulation is to solve which slab material parameter values (for Blender) produce the same reflectance and transmittance in the virtual environment. Solving of these parameters produces the Result signal that can be used in System simulation.

System simulation

System simulation is the high level simulation where the material slabs of Slab simulation will be placed to create a meaningful recreation of some macroscopic scale scene.

In forest simulation, this system would be the forest (or a single tree) where the simulated slabs are placed. In simulating a production line of plastic parts, this could be the conveyor belt with feeding the plastic part forward in the process.

Parameter Names

Commonly used parameter names

forest_id: DEPRECATED Old name for system_sim_name.
system_sim_name: Name of the system simulation. This is used to identify a specific simulation and used in the directory structure.
set_name: DEPRECATED Old nane for slab_sim_name.
slab_sim_name: Name of the slab simulation. This is used to identify a specific simulation and used in the directory structure.
sample_id: DEPRECATED An old name for signal_id.
signal_id: An integer that identifies a specific signal in a slab simulation.
slab_model_name: The name of a slab model. There can be many models trained for different purposes, such as slabs of different thicknesses. Each model has either an optimization, surface figging, or neural network solver, depending on how it was trained. The optimization solver is always usable even without training.
runtime: Runtime data that the program needs to perform all the tasks. This includes logging and Blender executable path, for example.