Porting Ladybug to Vectorworks Marionette

t.a.s · September 12, 2019, 6:10am

Hi there,

Has anyone had any success in converting the ladybug sun path/solar hours scripts into Vectorworks Marionette?

It seems the scripting language is both in Python, and our office would like to incorporate these tools into our native cad suite of vectorworks to improve our workflow and avoid unnecessary file conversions - as doing solar analysis studies forms a large part of our workload.

Any help would be much appreciated!

mostapha · September 12, 2019, 6:02pm

Hi @t.a.s and welcome to the forum!

I just did a quick search to see what is Vectorworks Marionette. It looks like it is a node based workflow similar to Grasshopper but for Vectorworks. If it is possible to execute Python scripts then you should be able to use our new [+] libraries to run the studies. You will still need to write the conversion from Vectorworks geometry to what core libraries need but the rest of the code has no UI dependencies.

Here is a code sample from ladybug:

and another one from honeybee:

This slide should help you to understand the code structure:

That future plugin can be the one for Vectorworks. You just need to write the geometry library which is fairly small and the rest will be taken care of with ladybug-tools libraries.

t.a.s · September 13, 2019, 12:32am

Hi @mostapha - thank you kindly for the response - I’ll have a look further into this, however I am a fairly basic grasshopper user and think creating something such as the geometry library is far above my ability!

I will contact our vectorworks support and see if there is someone who can potentially help out with this.

tomac · October 18, 2022, 2:33am

Hi. Sorry to revive an old post however this subject has also been recently raised in my office.

@t.a.s, did you make any progress on this?

Has anyone else built the geometry conversion library and successfully executed Ladybug from within Vectorworks?

NorihiroOta · June 17, 2023, 3:28am

Hi @tomac

I’m currently in the process of converting ladybug tools to vectorworks, and it’s been somewhat successful.

I’m working on it in Japanese, but I hope it helps.

mostapha · June 17, 2023, 3:07pm

Hi @NorihiroOta - This is a very interesting project. I’m not sure how Vectorworks work and how your integration is going to be implemented but if they have a visual scripting environment similar to Grasshopper then you might be able to use the methodology that is used by ladybug-blender.

They have re-written the two fromgeometry and togeometry modules which are going to be specific to the platform and then they use a template to automatically translate the Grasshopper components to Sverchok nodes.

github.com

ladybug-tools/ladybug-blender/blob/master/generic_node.mustache

import bpy
import ladybug_tools.helper
from bpy.props import StringProperty
from sverchok.node_tree import SverchCustomTreeNode
from sverchok.data_structure import updateNode, zip_long_repeat

ghenv = ladybug_tools.helper.ghenv

class Sv{{{nickname}}}(bpy.types.Node, SverchCustomTreeNode):
    bl_idname = 'Sv{{{nickname}}}'
    bl_label = '{{{name}}}'
    sv_icon = 'LB_{{{nickname_uppercase}}}'
    {{#inputs}}
    sv_{{{name}}}: StringProperty(name='{{{name}}}', update=updateNode, description='{{{description}}}')
    {{/inputs}}

    def sv_init(self, context):
        self.width *= 1.3
        {{#inputs}}
        input_node = self.inputs.new('SvLBSocket', '{{{name}}}')

This file has been truncated. show original

The inputs are these JSON objects that are generated automatically for every single Ladybug component.

I had to write this quickly and I know it doesn’t include all the details but I hope it makes sense and is enough to communicate the idea. Let me know if you have any questions.

NorihiroOta · June 18, 2023, 6:48am

Thank you @mostapha !!!

I’m sorting things out now, but I’m gradually replacing the contents of the ladybug_rhino folder with vectorworks scripts.

github.com

onokennote/Ladybug-tool_for_Vectorworks/blob/main/ladybug_vectorworks/fromgeometry.py

import vs
import math 

#from .config import tolerance
from .color import color_to_color, gray

try:
	from ladybug_geometry.geometry2d.line import LineSegment2D
except ImportError as e:
	raise ImportError('Failed to import ladybug_geometry.\n{}'.format(e))


'''
def obj2plane(obj , plane ):
	(ax,ay,az ) =plane.o
	vx = plane.x
	vy = plane.y
	vs.Move3DObj(obj,ax,ay,az)
	return obj
'''

This file has been truncated. show original

There are some differences in ideology and behavior, but the Marionette nodes are similar to the Grasshopper components, and they now work to some extent.

Again, thanks to the design that separates the core scripts and geometry stuff.

I sincerely appreciate your contribution!

Please let me know if you have any questions.

tomac · June 20, 2023, 3:56am

Very cool @NorihiroOta! I’ll take a look.