Are you aware of a way to bring in grouped shading objects from HB-PH to WUFI Passive?
I have a site with a quite a few different tree objects. To get a closer assessment of the shading impact throughout the year, my objective is to toggle the deciduous trees from ‘Opaque’ to ‘Transparent’ in WUFI Passive to determine custom Mean Monthly Shading Factors.
The issue is that all shading elements are brought in as single surfaces in the ‘Remaining Elements’ section, which requires selecting each surface separately in WUFI (time consuming) and grouping . I am able to at least name them before exported the model with HB-PH, but am not aware of a way to quickly select multiple objects in WUFI and group from the Remaining Elements list.
Ah - yes: I was actually just struggling with this myself this morning.
Yes - right now the way I’ve implemented it, each surface comes in as a single component. What I am finding is that not only does this make management tough, but for very large scenes it seems to reeeeeallllly slow down the initial ‘open xml’ for some reason?
I was thinking that I should do some sort of ‘merging’ operation to combine the surfaces into merged components (as I’m doing with the building surfaces) and try and merge vertices as well in order to reduce the file size / XML open time.
But at the very least yes: I can try and add a ‘grouping’ method there for sure, based on the name. I’ll have to test out a few possible methods, but I am sure I can make something like that work. I’ll get back to you once I have a chance to try some things out.
Definitely. I’ve added a new Issue to the project page: link and I’ll see if I can make this fix soon. I’ll let you know once I have an update ready to test out.
I think I have a solution that works re: grouping shading objects. If you have a chance and would like to try it out, you can download the updated HBPH installer here: - - Link - - and then re-run the installer. Once you reboot Rhino, it should work now.
I added a group-by-display-name to the shade faces, so any shade face will get grouped together with any other face that has the same honeybee display_name. This means that by default, you should see Brep faces get grouped together (ie: on a tree or neighbor building or something like that):
But: if you prefer to have all the shades lumped into a single WUFI-Passive component instead, you just need to do just a little funny-business in HB to make sure that all the shape faces have the same display-name. If you use a DeconstructBrep, flatten, graft, and then set the name on the HB-Shade component, that seems to work:
I’ve attached an example file here with the two scenarios. Let me know if this seems to solve your use-case though, or if you have any issues with the updated installer?
Hi @edpmay - It took me a while to get back to this, but I’ve tested it out now and the second method worked with no issues!
When I tried the first method (after updating, etc.) the shading still came in as separate surfaces (I am assuming this is because of how my shading geometry is organized - see screenshot below). However, once I used the second method things came in perfectly. This model has 121 separate shading surfaces, so consolidating them into groups is a huge time saver for me when going through the protocol of adjusting WUFI’s mean monthly shading factors to account for deciduous trees loosing leaves in winter. Thank you!
