Is there a way to check if surface normals "look" towards each other ?

Based on how vertices are arranged for a glazing the surface normal of the glazing could point inwards (into the room) or outwards.

Is there a shortcut within Honeybee/Grasshopper to check if the surface normals of the floor and glazings are facing each other ?

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Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on October 27, 2015 at 11:08pm

Hi Sarith, There are solutions to figure this out both with Grasshopper or Honeybee methods. What is the context? Do you want to make sure that window is looking inwards? Are you using HBZone for daylight modeling or creating the model surface by surface? In the former window will always be looking outwards so you should reverse the order. In the second one you can use HBSurface.normal to calculate the angle between the surfaces to check.

Permalink Reply by Sarith Subramaniam on October 28, 2015 at 12:14am

Hi Mostapha, I was actually trying to write a quick and dirty hack for the 3phase method within Grasshopper/Honeybee when I noticed that the only way to achieve a fair amount of automation is to calculate view direction by code and then feed it to genklemsamp. Based on how the model was created, the order of vertices, and therefore the direction of the surface normal, is likely to cause an issue. So I thought of testing where the surface normal of the glazing faced wrt the floor surface.

Do you think there is an elegant solution to this ?

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on October 28, 2015 at 4:27pm

That's a very cool hack! See this file. If we can get it work for this zone then we can implement it to Honeybee. Here is an example that reverse all the glazing surfaces to look inward.

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