Electric Lighting Components - Automate view selection

Hello everyone,

First of all a big thanks to Sarith for these amazing components!

I have only played around them for a bit and they look amazing. It is actually incredible how much faster than Dialux it makes the electric lighting assessment process, especially since I can run a whole floor of HB zones at once.

I had a small request though. I realize that we can probably do top down or perspective views quickly by selecting a dark sky and no roof in zones. But I was wondering if instead we could have a quick selection of a view inside a zone (much like dialux does when you make a room). I could do it manually but it is a bit time consuming especially when the number of zones increases. Furthermore, by allowing the zones to be simulated 'as is', the components are seamlessly integrated into my other workflows (e.g. energy models/definitions).

I am not aware if there is an automatic view selection of a zone for the Rhino camera. And I am also not sure if small areas will fit well with Rhinos camera (perhaps a change in angle and zoom is needed there). Any ideas how this can be done?

Kind regards,

Theodore.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on February 5, 2016 at 8:15pm

Hi Theodore,

Automating views are already implemented in Honeybee. You can save the views in Rhino as namedViews and then connect the list of view names to imageBased recipe. Honeybee will generate a separate image for each view in the same run.

Mostapha

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on February 5, 2016 at 8:24pm

Hi Mostapha,

Thanks for the reply. What I was asking is something much more lazier than that! :)

I was thinking if we could generate those namedViews by plugging in a zone to a component/input. Maybe the view could be positioned just inside of the middle of one of the walls, looking in? Now that I think about it maybe I can do it with native components. It should be easy to get the normal and the point, can you get a view out of this in GH? If we could also manipulate lens from GH should be set. I'll look into it after my break perhaps native GH can do it.

In any case, could be something useful or not. I know that it could be useful in this simulation but not in many others (maybe glare).

Kind regards,

Theodore.

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on February 5, 2016 at 8:28pm

Check Ladybug_Set the view component. Abraham has a good example file here that shows how to set up the component.

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on February 5, 2016 at 8:40pm

Excellent thanks, will do it!

I admit I never needed it before.

Permalink Reply by Anastasios Kokkos on February 7, 2016 at 7:15am

Hi Theodore,

I would recomend you to check the heteroptera plug in as well. It has a camera component that allows you to automate views from grasshopper using source points and target points as inputs. hope it helps!

Tasos

Permalink Reply by Sarith Subramaniam on February 7, 2016 at 8:03am

Hi Everyone,

Unlike Honeybee/Radiance, Dialux primarily uses a view-independent Radiosity algorithm to perform lighting calculations. So, once the calculation is done Dialux has a lot more leeway in how the rendered image can be displayed. For any given view, Dialux omits a couple of surfaces for the room so that rest of the surfaces can be viewed well.

I am not sure if something exactly similar is possible with Honeybee/Radiance. The closest options might be :

1. Get the geometric extents of the zone and then select the upper leftmost point (x,y,z) as reference. In radiance terms -vp x+0.5 y+0.5 z-0.5 and -vd 1 1 -0.5 should produce a somewhat useful rendered image.

2. The other ("lazier") option might be to simply use a clipping plane for all zones at a particular height. For example :

(By the way, I never knew that Honeybee had a component for automating views !)

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on February 8, 2016 at 12:50am

Hi everyone!

Thanks for the answers and the ideas!

I think the cutting planes will be enough for an idea of the overall room performance and it is actually what most construction requirements ask for. I will look into assigning automatic views for the cases where I need to understand, and present, in more detail the space performance.

Kind regards,

Theodore.

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