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Radiance outputs ?

asked 2014-11-12 13:41:20 -0500

RMAK's avatar

updated 2017-05-08 18:33:12 -0500

Hello everyone, Ok so I was able to run Open studio with radiance and have finished the simulation (yay !). I was looking through the illuminance map on the results viewer but the output is not that clear. I was wondering if there was some way I could get my output to be similar to the one provided by Autodesk Ecotect ? They show the geometry with the associated lux levels of the sunlight falling on the surface. Is there any way I can do this ? Please help. I have a presentation on Friday regarding this and so I would like something visually appealing. :(

Kind Regards, Rafid Khan

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answered 2014-11-12 14:18:34 -0500

nfonner's avatar

I am not aware of ability to see the geometry in context of the maps, but once a radiance run is complete you can load the radout.sql located in the 1-Ruby-0 folder into ResultsViewer. Locate the "Illuminance Map" in the Table View pallete window and double click to render it.

It is an instantaneous plot of the illuminance map for the entire year. You can then pick a date and time and grab a graphical plot of lux. The geometry is nothing more than the area of the illuminance map drawn in the SketchUp plugin as far as I know. So you will have to work some post-processing magic to bring the geometry back into play.

It would be nice if the legacy OS (or current OS) plugin also allowed you to render the data visually onto the illuminance map grid and use the shadow settings dialog menu to advance the date and time of the plot using the "Render by Data Value" setting.

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@nfonner, the grid you see on the Illuminance map in SketchUp is just an image, so if you did a screen capture from results viewer you could swap out the image in SketchUp. It may be locked so you might have to play around to do this. Adjusting with the SketchUp's native date/time is trickier. We used to do this with surface colors based on either zone or surface timeseries data from the E+ SQL file, but it chocked on these. Swapping images vs. color would be slower. Best solution may be web based 3d view made in reporting measure.

David Goldwasser's avatar David Goldwasser  ( 2014-11-12 22:17:59 -0500 )edit
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answered 2014-11-12 22:31:27 -0500

updated 2014-11-13 00:19:00 -0500

Sorry @RMAK, but the method you already found, looking at the results in Results Viewer, is the only simple way to view the Radiance simulation data with OpenStudio. As @nfonner mentioned, there is no architectural context with this data; you are merely seeing the shape of the individual illuminance map, and you can only view them one at a time.

One workaround for this in the short term is to make a single illuminance map that covers an entire floor (as best you can with a rectangular map, anyway), set your interior thermal zone boundaries to "air wall" constructions (so the daylight can pass from perimeter space(s) to interior ones), and add any interior geometry with interior surface partition groups and objects. The resulting illuminance map will show the spatial distribution of the daylight and will show the effect of any interior walls or other objects. If you have a high enough resolution illuminance map grid, and good detail of the interior space, you get a very clear picture of how the building is admitting daylight and what's happening to it inside the building. Maybe not persentation quality, but useful for design work.

Yet another thing we are working on adding to OpenStudio is an improved data format and some plotting routines so that you can do better building-wide data visualizations in a dynamic way.

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Asked: 2014-11-12 13:41:20 -0500

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Last updated: Nov 13 '14