crawfords
2011-06-17, 08:59 PM
Our Sustainability group is keenly interested in obtaining accurate percent shading values on surfaces such as windows and PV arrays for their calculations. I have been giving myself fits trying to get values for them from our Revit models.
Energy software has proven to be difficult to work with: Ecotect has been shown to return inaccurate results for shading, and IES only imports 3-D models in gbXML format, which severely limits the type and accuracy of the geometry that can be imported.
Now that Revit has the nifty solar tools, it seems that it should be a simple matter to return area or percent shading values for a given object or surface. We're resorting to drawing filled regions on the shaded areas of elevations or plans, and then calculating the percent shading by hand. This seems like a labor-intensive workaround for the information that we are seeking.
Has anyone else come up with a way to develop these calcs? Perhaps I should be poking around in the API? Thanks.
-Crawford
Energy software has proven to be difficult to work with: Ecotect has been shown to return inaccurate results for shading, and IES only imports 3-D models in gbXML format, which severely limits the type and accuracy of the geometry that can be imported.
Now that Revit has the nifty solar tools, it seems that it should be a simple matter to return area or percent shading values for a given object or surface. We're resorting to drawing filled regions on the shaded areas of elevations or plans, and then calculating the percent shading by hand. This seems like a labor-intensive workaround for the information that we are seeking.
Has anyone else come up with a way to develop these calcs? Perhaps I should be poking around in the API? Thanks.
-Crawford