Analytical Model Updates

Hi @mostapha,

Following up from the email. This came up in one of the meetings trying to incorporate the Pollination to IES-VE model export. When we do the Pollination geometry preparation for energy modeling, if there is an architectural update with the model after we go through the export process, it essentially means that we need to go through the whole process once again, correct?

For instance, model 1 given to us this week, where we go through preparing the analytical model. However, next week the architects end up releasing model 2 with architectural updates. That just means we need to go through the similar geometry preparation process. There’s no way we could do model comparison between Model 1 and Model 2 within pollination and only pick up the changes that has happened, right?

Are we able to do model comparison within the Revit plugin?

Hi @resh,

I’m glad that this topic is making its way back! I like to think this is happening because we have made some progress on the basics, and we can now talk about the fancy workflows. We even used to have a slide for this in our presentations which we stopped presenting.

Here is a video that shows the process in action:

Now here is why it never got as popular as we liked:

  1. You could only use it from inside Rhino.
  2. Our method was using room identifiers to match the previous design option to the new design option. That means we were relying on the design teams to keep editing the same room instead of deleting an existing room, and creating a new one. That is not how people model inside Revit.

The short answer is not right now! But it can be something that we can address later this year.

  1. We are creating a new interface for editing the models in Revit which can also be used for comparing the models against each other.
  2. We are adding a concept of saving snapshots of the Revit model. That means you can keep and load the older snapshot of the model for comparison with the new one.
  3. We will need to update our current approach and use a mixture of geometry and room identifiers for the comparison. It will include some help from the users to identify which room has changed to what, but with the new UI (item 1) it should be possible.

I make no promises right now but this is a feature that makes a lot of sense to be supported by Pollination plugins. It will be a matter of time before we offer a solution for it.

Thinking about it more, maybe we can get away by just tagging those rooms as newly added and removed now that we can have a UI to overlay them on top of each other.

I’m also adding @chriswmackey, and @antonellodinunzio to this topic to keep them in the loop.