1.6.0 - Questions regarding new Benefit component and workflow

[chris]

@Wujo ,

I’m really sorry that I missed seeing this a few months ago but it looks like you figured it all out since both of your interpretations are correct. I have taken your advice and added a note to the component description that positive values are helpful and negative values are harmful:

fix(visualize): Improve the description of radiation benefit sky

If you find any other issues in the component descriptions or the latest sample files, let me know and I will fix them.

The reason why the values are slightly different than Legacy is because of the reason I described here:

Difference Between "LB Incident Radiation" and "Ladybug Solar Radiation" Components

Good question and this is directly linked to what I said here: In LBT, we do the ray tracing for a full sphere around each point so that we can account for the radiation that’s “reflected” off the ground (technically, we’re doing this by assuming an emissive ground hemisphere that has 0.2 the intensity of the sky hemisphere, much in the same way Radiance does). In legacy, we only looked at the radiation coming from the sky dome, which was ok for some purposes but could be 20% less than expect…

Essentially, the new radiation components are a little more accurate in the way that they try to account for ground-reflected solar energy.