Run energy simulation using GH live connection

[Anonymous]

Hello Everyone!
I am new here and I hope I will get some kind of help.
To cut a long story short, I am trying to run an energy simulation of the building in GH using climate studio. To achieve this, I use the zone component, then deconstruct it and extract brew in order to create thermal zones for later use. I succeeded to run the simulation with a shoebox. Now I try to apply the same method to more complex geometry and unfortunately, it is not working. As it can be seen from the screenshot, the zone in ArchiCAD is very different from what is displayed in the rhino viewport, I do not really understand why. The zone is created with the inner edge method.
Does anyone have an idea why is this happening or how it can be solved?

Thank you in advance!

[Laszlo Nagy]

So, if I understand correctly, the second screenshot shows the 3D body of the Zone you are using in Archicad.
You feed that geometry into the "Zone" Input of the "Deconstruct Zone" Node in Grasshopper, then convert the "BREP" Output to a BREP, and you get that funky geometry in Rhino.

Could you post another screenshot from the same point of view but this time showing all the elements in Archicad that are acting as the boundaries of this specific Zone? Like the Walls and Roofs? Do you see any correspondence between the surface pattern of these Zone Boundary elements and the BREP geometry of the Zone in Rhino? I mean, like there are windows in the Wall in Archicad that are kind of reflected in the funky Zone BREP in Rhino? I am just shooting in the dark here, so that may totally not be the case.

[Minh Nguyen]

Dear Mariami,

Thank you very much for the question!

Based on my own experiment and what we know about Rhino, part of the issue is the difference in how Archicad presents Brep vs how Rhino does it.



As you can see in this simple example, even a wall with a hole will be represented with many triangles in Rhino. But the geometry itself is still correct. Your example looks way funkier than mine, so I'm wondering if you can share with me the example PLN for further investigation? Please let me know if you need a secure place to upload it!

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,
Minh

[furtonb]

Well, I think you will achieve what you are after if you export your Zone geometries to .3dm from the 3D window, open in Rhino, explode the blocks, Purge the file, then use "MergeAllCoplanarFaces" on the breps.

I would build your .gh script with geometry pipelines with specific layer names, it won't drive you as mad.
So you could create a Rhino file as a "template" for your workflow, then just copy the cleaned breps to it and put them on the respective layers. It's pretty smooth even with dozens of rooms (I use Honeybee wth GH).

I have a morph cleaner .gh somewhere, which finds the surface normals for each face then merges coplanar elements based on a threshold (basically what you would do in Rhino manually). I couldn't find that script now - I've tested it for a few geometries then abandoned it, if you are curious I could look for it... My conclusion was to rebuild the inputs manually for energy modelling anyway.

If you take a look at the Ladybug Tools forum, there are numerous threads about issues with AC - same applies for Climate Studio. Luckily for us ugly topology is sufficient for lighting at least...

(Maybe a wish is in the air: if the structural analytical format has rule based cleanups for the analytical model, the energy modelling side could use some love. Especially now, that on the dark side they have Rhino.Inside.Revit, and a brand new Pollination plugin is coming for Revit from the LBT guys...
Chris Mackey gave a presentation a few days ago, it was asked whether Archicad will get similar attention as Revit:
He wasn't too promising...)