Cycles and sliders

Hello everyone,

I'm making some hourly solar radiation simulations in a large geometry with more than 1000 individual buildings, so I'm calculating one building at a time. To do this, I created a "buildings" slider to select each building and run the solar radiation simulation and save the result into an excel file. It works, however it takes around 2 hours to compute radiation in all buildings, but I think there's nothing I can do about execution time.

The problem is that I would like to change the Analysis Period automatically and restart the "buildings" slider so that I don't have to check my computed every 2 hours, but I just can't figure out how...

For instance, suppose I want to calculate hourly solar radiation for the 21st of January, from 6am to 7 pm. It would be convenient if I could Animate the "hours" slider so that once the simulation for the last building was finished the "buildins" slider went to 0 again and the hour changed to 7. And so on...

Perhaps a small script with a basic cycle would solve the matter, but I still can't figure out to control the sliders as they have no input options.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

And I'm sorry if this is a basic question or it has been discussed before (I'm new here and I didn't yet find similar discussion on this website).

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on January 19, 2016 at 5:50am

One hour and twenty minutes for 100 buildings for 13 hours (6am through 6pm); laptop is a Dell Inspiron 3521 running Windows 8.1:

I think it's worth trying to swap the loops, as suggested.

And it seems very worthwhile to me to filter out building surfaces that can't possibly receive sunlight, either because they face north or are next door to other buildings.