Rhino, Grasshopper, Ladybug, Honeybee and related fauna

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Welcome to the world of daylight modeling! Funny you ask about this now, your timing is quite good. Mostapha Roudsari has been rather active on this forum in the last day or so, and he's the author of the tools Ladybug and Honeybee, which are both well-suited to the daylighting visualizations you seem interested in. Links to these tools, and tutorials on how to use them, are on Mostapha's GitHub profile.

For easy integration of Radiance-based daylighting analysis with an energy model, I humbly submit that OpenStudio and the Radiance measure that comes with its latest versions is your best bet, and does not require any commercial software such as Rhino or Grasshopper. But this will merely give you a whole building energy use result; the OpenStudio Radiance measure is not long on visualizations currently.

Hi @Chris Jones.

You're right. Most of the available resources are video tutorials. There are a number of blog posts that some of the users has posted for specific cases but there is no structured written tutorials similar to these video tutorials.

This presentation slides should answer some of your questions. Also this post by Paul Wintor might be a good place to start. He has also written a post for sunlighthours calculation with ladybug. You can find more posts about Ladybug and Honeybee on his website.

It has been awhile that I want to record a number of short videos that shows use-cases similar to what you said but assuming the long list of things that I want/need to do including rewriting Ladybug + Honeybee that may take some time to happen.

Meanwhile the best place to find examples for different workflows beside the tutorial videos is Hydra. Hydra is the visual repository for several Ladybug and Honeybee workflows. There is a short description for each example file and also screen captures of the final results. Some of them even have videos. Here is one of the examples for sunlighthours.

You can read more on Ladybug forum. It is also the best place to post your questions. Maybe if you post the same question on the group someone from the community can get back to you with better resources. There are several schools which are teaching Ladybug + Honeybee. I wonder if they have some examples that they can share. Here is an old tutorial from Building Technology Laboratory class at MIT.

I hope that I have somewhat answered your question. Let me know your thoughts. We're re-organizing the whole development and this is the best time to hear feedback such as yours. Thanks.