Revision history [back]

Suley, We are aware of the stability problems in the OpenStudio SketchUp Plugin, in particular with the intersect feature. We are currently using a native SketchUp method for this. It has issues in particular it seems with geometry that was initially imported from other cad tools, but I have also seen issues in native SketchUp geometry. We are developing native OpenStudio intersect methods that could then be used within SketchUp or as stand alone measures in the OpenStudio application. This should be both faster and more stable. We are also investigating other enhancements to creating and editing geometry in OpenStudio.

A few more things to avoid when using the Plugin to keep your model clean.

• Don't use the Undo button. If you make a mistake and drew something you didn't want to, use the eraser to delete it.
• Unless you need to for other reasons, generally don't save the SKP file. I typically turn off autosave in the SketchUp preferences.
• If something looks wrong, don't save, use SaveAs instead. Then quit SketchUp, re-launch it and then open the model to see if there are still problems. If there are problems and they can't be easily fixed, you can back up to a previous model.

Things you should do when using the Plugin

• Use SaveAs often so you can roll back to earlier versions of the model
• Always Save or SaveAs before a large batch operation, including intersect.
• If your model is behaving oddly run the diagnostic user script script under "Reports / OSM Diagnostic Script". Set arguments for both errors and warnings to true. This doesn't run on your live model, but rather prompts you to brows for an OSM. If it finds things that need to be changed it will change a copy of the file. You can then load that copy. The ruby console will report out what was changed. This isn't comprehensive, but does fix a number of common issues.
• Unless you have a reason not to, use the "Create Spaces From Diagram" tool instead of manually creating spaces. You can run this multiple times, or use it in conjunction with hand drawn spaces.

One last thought on plenums. We have users making models 100 spaces on each floor. In that case a single plenum spanning the floor will have more than 200 surfaces and will have a negative impact on simulation run time. You could break them plenum into 4-5 separate plenums to speed up the run, but you can also make the plenum floor and ceiling a single solid surface with an adiabatic boundary condition. Then you can set the adjacent surfaces in spaces above and below to adiabatic. The surface search tools can help you do this, as well as assigning a construction for adiabatic (currently the default construction set doesn't include a construction for this boundary condition). If you expect significant temperature difference between the plenum and spaces this may not be a good idea.

Let me know if any other questions or issues come up.

David

Suley, We are aware of the stability problems in the OpenStudio SketchUp Plugin, in particular with the intersect feature. We are currently using a native SketchUp method for this. It has issues in particular it seems with geometry that was initially imported from other cad tools, but I have also seen issues in native SketchUp geometry. We are developing native OpenStudio intersect methods that could then be used within SketchUp or as stand alone measures in the OpenStudio application. This should be both faster and more stable. We are also investigating other enhancements to creating and editing geometry in OpenStudio.

A few more things to avoid when using the Plugin to keep your model clean.

• Don't use the Undo button. If you make a mistake and drew something you didn't want to, use the eraser to delete it.
• Unless you need to for other reasons, generally don't save the SKP file. I typically turn off autosave in the SketchUp preferences.
• If something looks wrong, don't save, use SaveAs instead. Then quit SketchUp, re-launch it and then open the model to see if there are still problems. If there are problems and they can't be easily fixed, you can back up to a previous model.

Things you should do when using the PluginPlugin.

• Use SaveAs often so you can roll back to earlier versions of the modelmodel.
• Always Save or SaveAs before a large batch operation, including intersect.
• If your model is behaving oddly run the diagnostic user script script under "Reports / OSM Diagnostic Script". Set arguments for both errors and warnings to true. This doesn't run on your live model, but rather prompts you to brows for an OSM. If it finds things that need to be changed it will change a copy of the file. You can then load that copy. The ruby console will report out what was changed. This isn't comprehensive, but does fix a number of common issues.
• Unless you have a reason not to, use the "Create Spaces From Diagram" tool instead of manually creating spaces. You can run this multiple times, or use it in conjunction with hand drawn spaces.

One last thought on plenums. We have users making models 100 spaces on each floor. In that case a single plenum spanning the floor will have more than 200 surfaces and will have a negative impact on simulation run time. You could break them plenum into 4-5 separate plenums to speed up the run, but you can also make the plenum floor and ceiling a single solid surface with an adiabatic boundary condition. Then you can set the adjacent surfaces in spaces above and below to adiabatic. The surface search tools can help you do this, as well as assigning a construction for adiabatic (currently the default construction set doesn't include a construction for this boundary condition). If you expect significant temperature difference between the plenum and spaces this may not be a good idea.

Let me know if any other questions or issues come up.

David