Funny Daylight results

[Andre Baros]

I have two buildings I'm running through Ecotect room by room to check daylight levels.

Project 1 is "simple" boxes with punched openings. by simple I mean that they are mostly rectangular with some L shaped rooms and some rooms with alcoves, but all floor and ceilings are parallel, etc. I gave up exporting the model from Revit and simply redrew each zone in Ecotect. I used the zone tool to create what I thought were water proof boxes, placed windows which are hosted by the walls, etc. In one room I have a strange spike of light in one corner, far from any windows. I added a partition wall around that area so that there are NO ways for light to get in but it is still the brightest part of the analysis grid. I adjusted the grid to make sure that it was inset from the walls, same problem, it's as if the ceiling is missing for that area. Redrawing the ceiling didn't help, nor did putting a second ceiling as a shading object above the model. Obviously the results for that room are useless but I can't seam to identify what is causing the massive light leak.

In the second project I have the opposite issue. A rectangular room with a row of windows along one edge exported from Revit via gbXML. After running the daylight analysis I have one window (which started out identical to the rest) which doesn't have the typical bright spot in front of it. Again, how do I trust any result?

A. Is there a way to trouble shoot such issues.
B. Can I trust any results or should I use a different program... I'm talking about VERY basic analysis here.

edit: Second issue was user error, when the odd window was one which I used to check materials, and had inadvertently changed to no-material.

[jon.gardzelewski.217169]

I don't quit understand, did you figure this out? Without reading this closely it sounds as if you're saying that the program is useless.

Are you asking for a step by step guide to troubleshooting cases of user error? Or are you asking for someone to tell you why project one has a yellow spot in the corner?

[Andre Baros]

Both.
There are day's when I feel the program is useless. I spent more time than I was budgeted trying to get a model to import from Revit. After that didn't work, I gave up and re-drew the project in Ecotect. I was very careful to redraw each room carefully... each as it's own file and even though this mostly worked, I still had funny results.

At this stage, I assume it's user error and would like a checklist for trouble shooting.

[kafka]

Both.
There are day's when I feel the program is useless. I spent more time than I was budgeted trying to get a model to import from Revit. After that didn't work, I gave up and re-drew the project in Ecotect. I was very careful to redraw each room carefully... each as it's own file and even though this mostly worked, I still had funny results.

At this stage, I assume it's user error and would like a checklist for trouble shooting.

Yes it often happens to me that despite following well knonw procedures then I get weirdly unexpected results ( an not only for lighting but very often for shadows analysis).

I think Autodesk should give more support to users with ecotect...but maybe they put more effort to help users from the subscription program obviously.

[jon.gardzelewski.217169]

If you can post it to me I can look at it:
jon@freeformenergy.com

[Andre Baros]

Thank you, redrawing the room from scratch solved the problem so it must have been a modeling error. I've already deleted the old "bad" file.

[David Haynes]

Andre,

What problems were you having going from Revit to Ecotect?
Were you using Revit 2010 and Ecotect 2010?

[Andre Baros]

I've never had a problem with my small test models, but on every real project I've tried, I've had issues.
1. First project we tried it on was a school, in the Revit model every room had windows, in the Ecotect model about half did. I turned out that some of our curtain walls (used to create the windows) had their location lines aligned with the host walls (and exported correctly) and some were offset (rather than creating new mullion and panels types, the whole curtain wall was shifted in thicker walls, etc). It took Autodesk a few weeks to trouble shoot that one and it was too late by then. I believe that this issue has been fixed in 2010.

2. In a different building, we had a theatre space where the tiers were a series of floors and low walls and for the life of me I could never get it to hold water. The room would export (if it exported at all) with some sort of spill into the void space under the seating. That project also had a multi story space which had issues. We ran out of time to run the full analysis on that one and went with more conservative systems that we were hoping to. For that project the MEP was design build so there was no engineer on board to model it. We were hoping to use our model to check some of their assumptions... since the point of a lot of our green and passive strategies was to reduce the size of the mechanical system... oh well.

3. The project which the rooms from this post came are from had an issue with phases... the model would include some openings from previous phases so we had too many windows. There was also the huge time suck of realizing that the structural model cut a lot of corners and we weren't getting light into some spaces because they hadn't included the openings in their parts of the model...grr... the "lines" were there in plan but I didn't realize right away that the openings were not.

4. Gotta get back to work, but those are some of the more memorable issues.