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How to model underground floors in Openstudio

asked 2014-10-21 04:33:05 -0500

HMPereira's avatar

updated 2015-07-10 21:02:05 -0500

Hello

I'm new to Openstudio. I'm been trainning a couple of weeks and now I need to model a bulding that have 9 floors, 3 of them are underground, for parking.

I already draw on sketchup the total floors, and put the axles on the right place, but when I hit "surface matching" icon, I look to the colors and I see that the underground walls are blue, like outdoors.

Can someone help me and tell me how to do this, please? Thank you.

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answered 2014-10-21 07:38:15 -0500

keb's avatar

updated 2014-10-21 08:50:12 -0500

You can change the wall Outside Boundary Condition settings in the Inspector. From within Sketchup, this is accessed with the button that has the icon which looks like a magnifying glass and a square/cube inside of it. You can either go into each space (double-click on the space) which has external walls, select each surface and select the "Ground" Outside Boundary Condition to change it from "Outdoors", or:

You can also select all floors that are underground and use the Search Surfaces utility then "search selection" for class:Surface, type:Wall, Outside Boundary Condition:Outdoors. Then select each surface (the rest of the model with hide after you search selection) and change the Outside Boundary Condition definition to "Ground" in the Inspector. You can write a script to change the boundary condition definition of all found surfaces at once if you want to automate the change and use in the future for example. Be sure to Unhide All in the Search Utility afterward so the rest of your model will reappear.

More information on the Inspector and Surface Search utility can be found here under Sketchup Plugin, Information Tools: http://nrel.github.io/OpenStudio-user...

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Great detail Kent. The change selected surfaces to adiabatic would be a good user script to alter or there is a BCL measure to change exterior walls to ground by story. To use this you would open the model in the stand alone OpenStudio app and use apply measures now.

change ext wall to ground by story

David Goldwasser's avatar David Goldwasser  ( 2014-10-21 09:07:01 -0500 )edit

David, Thanks for the reference to the BCL library. HMP, David's reference to the BCL measure library is important in that it automates tasks. In this case, one that does exactly what you want to do. That's not always the case, and then you do it step by step or write a measure/script. I'm still learning to use the BCL library more as measures become available.

keb's avatar keb  ( 2014-10-21 13:27:41 -0500 )edit

Hello

Thank you everyone. I use both methods and both work, Thank you.

It would be great to see this script on the Sketchup plugin, so We don't need to change to Openstudio and then come back to finished the model on Sketchup.

HMPereira's avatar HMPereira  ( 2014-10-21 16:11:32 -0500 )edit

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Asked: 2014-10-21 04:33:05 -0500

Seen: 2,254 times

Last updated: Oct 21 '14