Hi all. I’ve found I’m using the SkyView recipe often for instant facade feedback on a grid via a Human UI interface. Calculation times are generally ok (10-25 seconds) depending on context geometry. But I’d like to speed these up to just a few seconds. The workers option in the recipe doesn’t seem to have any effect as 8 cores is pretty much the same calc time as 1 core. If anyone has any tips or advice for a solution, I’d appreciate it
Thinks in Advance
Dan
Hi @ladyloo, You should check the logs and see the breakdown for running each task. It is likely that most of the time is spent preparing the model and post-processing and not the ray-tracing itself. The number of cores only helps with the ray-tracing step. If your model is small, using more cores might actually slow down the overall process because of the overhead of splitting the sensors and combining them back together.
That being said, we might be able to create an express flavor of the recipe. @mikkel can tell if it is possible.
Thanks @mostapha, that makes sense. @mikkel if that is possible to make an express flavour, that would be amazing. Or if you could direct me in a direction that I could perhaps put something together myself?
It is possible to create an express version, and I think the most suitable for sky-view is to create a version that takes analysis mesh (replacing grids) and context mesh as input instead of the Honeybee Model. This is similar to direct-sun-hours-express.
The only limitation to this is that it will not recognize transparent objects. The text below is from the Grasshopper component:
Also note that this recipe still respects the transparency of objects, reducing
the percentage of the sky visible through a certain geometry by the transmittance
of that geometry.
Hi @mikkel
I’m just coming back to this. I’ve looked at various options for this from python based ray tracing to dropping the model into Unreal Engine and using the native raytracer to get real time daylight levels. A full warren of rabbit holes which hasn’t really led anywhere… Is there any chance you can help me put together an express version? Happy to discuss here or take offline if you would be happy to help privately(?)
TIA
Dan
@ladyloo ,
If you are looking for a way of computing sky view that doesn’t have the overhead of the recipe (and you don’t need to use the cloudy sky option that the recipe has), then you can use the LB Veiw Percent component and set the view_type to SkyView or SkyExposure.
Since the component is not running a recipe, it won’t scale the best for large simulations but, when you’re only testing a few small geometries, it will be very fast as it has virtually no overhead.
Thanks @chris I’m actually running Vertical Sky Component so need the CIE overcast sky condition. Also I’m running a large number of grid positions across complex models so not sure this will be a good fit.
Hi @chris @mikkel Still trying to get an efficient/fast VSC/sky component calc. I tried the LB View Percent using sky view and am getting great results correlating well with radiance for uniform sky. Is there a way we can somehow get view percent to account for a CIE overcast sky as these results are somewhat lower than for uniform? The image below shows VSC CIE (via radaince) and LB View percent and you can see the CIE overcast values are quite a bit lower
Many Thanks
Dan
