Has anyone been able to successfully use the updated solar analysis tool in revit 2024 or 2023?
The 1.14 version is installed since the 1.13 version has timed out.
In Dynamo, after restarting revit and dynamo multiple ways, it shows no nodes available in search or the side panel. When opening an existing graph built and ran successfully with solar analysis 1.13 the nodes cannot be resolved
Curious to know what you are using the package for. Might be that there are more robust/efficient options, specifically if you are in a generative design context. One such use case was outlined at the AU session I helped to deliver this year.
Looking through your class material it seems you were using the solar analysis package that I found in the great graph you made available on dropbox. That solar analysis package timed out on 12/31/2023 so the dependencies with your files also do not load the package.
I am trying to get some real values (Peak and average insulation) caused by simple horizontal louvers and the affect on the building and pathways. I have done this successfully before in generative design, but the solar analysis package is now not working (1.13 and 1.14 both have been tested on multiple machines in RVT 23 and RVT 24). For now with a deadline I have taken the dynamo forma beta plugin and added 6 options currently to a new campus with 12 different locations of horizontal shading.
This looks okay but I really need specific values to rank the design options, and I want way more than 6 options using generative design. We are studying depth, spacing, width, and rotation angle for 12 different locations.
Better is a relative term - I have other solutions which might work out for you.
The important thing to note here is that you don’t actually need the “specific” values, but rather relative.
All the analysis toos I have seen use some fairly large assumptions - we’re working with solar data which means that a cloudy day will perform differently than a sunny one. And with climate change having pretty significant impact on things of late weather predictions are very hit or miss. There is still value in saying ‘this design performs better than that one by X%’, or “this design is shaded better by X%”, where X is the ‘exposed’ area divided by the unexposed area, but in all cases we have a good bit of abstraction to do.
And so we can utilize VASA to identify a ‘relative degree of solar exposure’ for a few times of day (say 3 hours before, at, and 3 hours after solar noon) at a few points of the year (say the summer and winter solstice, and the equinox). With that data you can optimize for better performing solutions in Generative Design, shift a few options up to Forma/Insight/Another full analysis tool and get real values. Well ‘more real looking’ values anyway.
There are a few posts on this within the forum, worth reviewing. I have also tagged the Dynamo team so hopefully they can address the latest build to get it working again shortly (I’m guessing it’s a Dynamo 2 vs Dynamo 3 issue).
Thanks. I did notice VASA in your handout material. I will check it out.
I am still using Dynamo 2.19 and 2.16 but I assume you are saying the Solar Analysis Package 1.14 is built for Dynamo 3. Hopefully the Dynamo Team can update us.
I may test the first one in generative design with denser spacing and remove the panel portion of the graph. It is frustrating something that worked perfectly a few weeks ago is now broken, but trying some new methods is also enjoyable. I have seen some of your videos on topologic before and I have been impressed with the speed in my own wayfinding studies. I will see if their energy performance analysis could work for this study. Thanks for putting out the great content.
Hi @acheilman version 1.15 has been published, locally it corrects the issue you reported. Please give it a shot, it should be findable on the package manager in 15 minutes.
Translated by moderator. See below the line for original post
Hi GavinNicholls, quick question about Dynamo/Revit: Do you happen to know how to perform a solar analysis for individual curtain wall panels and write the results directly into the panel parameters using Dynamo? I’m stuck and would be grateful for any tips! Cheers, Mohammad
Original post below
Hallo GavinNicholls, kurze Frage zu Dynamo/Revit: Weißt du zufällig, wie man eine Solaranalyse für einzelne Curtain-Wall-Paneele durchführt und die Ergebnisse per Dynamo direkt in die Paneel-Parameter schreibt? Ich komme da gerade nicht weiter und wäre für jeden Tipp dankbar! Grüße, Mohammad
Generally I don’t use Dynamo for solar analysis as it struggles with detailed models and heavy raycasting. In my experience you either go down the voxels route with VASA package (not my cup of tea… I don’t use it) or look into Rhino Inisde Revit/Grasshopper/Ladybug. Revit has some raycasting you can do in its API but not many packages support it - DataShapes has some nodes for it.
Sun angles are not available by default in RevitAPI/Dynamo, I’m working on a C# package if you know how to read it, but otherwise its a few months off at least. There are some hacks I used to use in Crumple but they depended on IronPython and don’t work in CPython3, so I removed them from the package when I switched to CPython3.
The general method I would use (in Rhino/Grasshopper) is:
Get panel outer faces (I often do this semi-manually in Rhino using element orinetated bounding boxes if panels are regular)
Divide them up into test grids (Ladybug has node for this, Honeybee generate test points)
Move the test grid slightly outside the panel/building
Get sun vectors, test mesh ray intersections vs context and cumulate the free rays to get time of sun across test period
You either heatmap the outcomes visually or take the best result received on the panel or average across its test points as direct solar access rating
Dynamo can do most of these steps, but it takes much more work and is much slower in my experience - not fit for purpose vs Gh here unless you want to do a fair bit of geometry gymnastics.
This is the API class for running ray tests. In my experience it is ironically quite hit/miss, sometimes registers misses which should hit:
C# example (not released yet):
Dynamo example (not my recommendation):
Rhino Inside example (generally the way we do it in the industry where I work):
Thank you very much, Just to clarify my goal: I simply want to assign a value to each panel indicating whether it receives high or low solar exposure. It doesn’t need to be highly accurate—a rough estimate is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, my end goal is to automatically apply a different material to the panels that receive very little sunlight. Since I am on a tight deadline, do you know what the quickest and simplest workflow would be to achieve this?
Deadline is irrelevant unfortunately - can’t dumb down my advice on that basis, you can’t make a complex workflow that simple in my experience. Try using the raybounce nodes from DataShapes for the sun rays to check, but I don’t know a simple and viable way to get sun vectors in Revit/Dynamo currently - still working on it.
My Rhino Inside workflow is the most robust approach in my experience, any Revit native one tends to either be overengineered (e.g. VASA) or underperforms (e.g. the faulty reference intersector).
You could try getting a line from each panel at sun angle then clash it with solid obstructing geometry in Dynamo using Geometry.Intersect nodes, but getting the actual sun angle and assuming your model is light enough to do that is challenging.
Hopefully someone more familiar with VASA can break that approach down for you.
hi Gavin you total right here,if folks want really sun analys and really get benefit from that, i guees we out of dynamo, maybe vasa, or as in your videos, or even rhino should be better
many use EIS here so it really can count energi from that…but in dynamo we stil have the analyse tool ootb…but again not really…just my 2 cent until now…look forward what you come up with
I see the grid with the different colors in your workflow. Because I don’t have a lot of time to build a fully automated script, I was wondering: Is it a good idea to just use an approach like this to visualize the results, and then manually edit and change the materials of my curtain wall panels based on the colors?
I feel like this manual adaptation might save me some time. What do you think?
VASA would be the way I’d do it. It’s simpiler than most think - the work can be done quite quickly in fact.
Get the solids of the context and building elements and union them into a single solid.
Generate a voxel model from the solid.
Extract that voxel model’s extents, and use that to generate a voxel model of the solid of each curtain panel.
Union the curtain panel models into one model, and then again into the context model.You have one voxel model of all the things, one model of just the curtain panels, and a list of voxel models for each curtain panel.
Get the solar angles from whatever source you like, as vectors towards the earth from the sun.
Use the solar angles to do a visibility study on the model - if you tested 12 vectors you should have 12 models.
Expand the visibility models horizontally by one voxel.
Intersect the expanded models with the curtain panel models.
Do a density map of the intersected models to get a model showing each voxel of a curtain panel that is hit once, or in every study. Bonus points if you use the weighted study to account for solar intensity.
Intersect the density map with each curtain panel.
Count hte intersected voxels - the last value greater than 1 is the intensity number you assigned to the instance parameter of the curtain panel.
Back in Revit’s UI, leverage a filter on the curtain panels to map the colors.
I don’t have time to build a tutorial, and it sounds like you don’t have time to learn the workflow now either @Mohammad.AlhajPGEZE. So instead I recommend sending the Revit model up to Forma Site Design and leveraging the solar analysis tooling there. Google’s AI mode has a good answer on the ‘how to’: Google Search.
Thank you so much for the detailed and honest reply. I really appreciate you taking the time to outline the VASA workflow step-by-step.
You are completely right about the time constraints. Your recommendation to use Autodesk Forma is exactly the kind of practical advice I need right now. I will definitely give the Forma workflow a try to get this done efficiently.
Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction
should be better
