Annual Daylight Simulation Higher Matrix (3PH, 5PH etc)

Hi Everybody,
I tested saveral daylight simulation and I am amazed about the future possibilities of Pollination. I would like to congratulate the team for that.

As an educator, I see this platform really ansewered the question of how integrated building design should work. How ever I still have some question considering daylight simulation:

  1. I see the folder inside the Pollination is/are organized or stuctured similar to HB[+] which I think it would be possible to run for Annual direct sunlight simulation such as ASE, except I did not see the replacement of the sun point in the sky patch with the analemma. Is this the reason why ASE metric still not available yet in Pollination?

  2. I am just wondering, if 3PH, 4PH, 5PH etc will available soon in Pollination or will be given priority for the development? This will be a game changer if so. It is because the nature of performing the higher matrix simulation is rather slow in a conventional way (radiance console or HB platform). I really hope ypu are moving to higher matrix simulation soon as I have said before you have structured the working folder and files inside Pollination similar to those HB[+].

  3. After I looked at your tutorial, I thought it would be possible to use the scence for simulation from HB[+] to be used in Pollination, do you have any tutorial considering this?

  4. I see that there is a seamless workflow from LBT 1 to Pollination in a way that the recipe is inherited the same input. Will there be seamless workflow for recipe similar to HB[+]? May be this is related to queation no 2.

  5. Is it legal to use Pollination for research purpose? Or we have to buy a license? Considering this I found out that in my account I cannot create a private project. To honest I still have not had a firm idea about Pollination licensing.

I appreciate for your attention and response.

Atta

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Hi @atthaillah,

Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face:

We are re-writing the recipes. It’s just a matter of time to add more metrics. As for ASE, the direct sunlight calculation is already part of the annual daylight recipe. We need to take it out and add the post processing. I have been [maybe too] cautious too cautious this time with adding ASE and sDA before implementing the dynamic blinds.

I don’t think we want to commit to provide 4PH recipe but 3 and 5 will be available. @mikkel is helping us to address a number of limitations of our current folder writer. We have made great progress so far which makes me hopeful that we can add them sooner than later.

The question about mixing and merging the results in a flexible manner is still open to be discussed but we can worry about it when we get there.

We are replacing HB[+] with honeybee-radiance. Besides the recipes is there any other reasons that you are using HB[+] and not honeybee-radiance?

This is how the recipes work. What you see in LBT plugins is the translated version of the recipes that are available on Pollination. Once we add the new recipes for 3/5 Phase to Pollination we can also expose them in LBT or you can simply use Pollination recipes from Grasshopper instead and execute them locally.

Pollination web app and cloud computing is currently in public Beta access and you can use it free of charge. In our pricing, which yet to be released, we have a free category with limited resources. We do not currently have a category for educational use. For now you have to use one of the other paid plans. That said we are interested to understand your needs and the needs of the rest of the research community and support them as best as we can. Supporting research is in our DNA.

You should be able to create private projects. Go to Settings on the project and change the project visibility.

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Yes, Firstly, with HB[+] we can just write the “ingredients” for simulation into a working folder without having to run the simulation on GH interface. The “write” option I see has gone from HB-Radiance workflow. In my opinion for a researcher somehow require to understand what is going on under the hood. which is hard in LBT 1 if a user does not have a background in Python. Secondly, as we can write all necessary folders, it allows us to perform parallel simulation without GH interface using the “.bat” file (it is like your parametric Pollination tutorial, yet, it was done on a local machine). To me it can save computer resources while at the same time it much easier to cancel the if problem appear while running the simulation outside Rhino/GH.

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I still can’t change the setting from public to private.

May be if you have option such as daylight only price or energy and comfort as an option would be great.

I like that you point these out. These functionalities have been improved in the new release. The combination of the local runs and the web interfaces gives you all of that and more with some major improvements in the new plugins:

  1. The execution is fully separated from the Grasshopper interface: which is what you had to do manually before.

  2. The execution runs in parallel by design: we use Luigi to execute the recipes so you don’t have to do it yourself.

  3. The recipes are reusable: you can just copy your new files as the input and it will work as is. You don’t have to regenerate the bat files for each case.

  4. You can study all the steps visually: Now it is easier than before to see every step that’s going behind the scene. You can both study them in a recipe graph like this one.


    You can also inspect an executed recipe by clicking on every step of the calculation for a specific run. If you click on every step you will see the command as well as the inputs and outputs. The goal is to make this information more accessible to both researchers and users who want to learn more.

I see. That’s a limitation that we put for personal accounts which I forgot about. I can create an organization account for you to try creating private projects: https://docs.pollination.cloud/user-manual/web-application/create-an-organization

Thank you for the suggestion but we intentionally decided to not go through pricing based on different types of studies. It can result in users not running the studies that are needed for a specific project just because they don’t have that module. In Pollination you can access all the public recipes. Users will decide how to distribute/share the private recipes.

As far as I understand, with the Luigi algorithms, if we run the simulation inside GH interface, the parallel simulations are performed for a single scenario. But, if we want to do simulation for some different scenarios at the same time I think it will be impossible. That’s why I chose to run parallel simulation for different scenarios outside the GH interface. Also, thanks to Pollination that has made it possible in an innovative way.

Ok I will try to send you my request. Currently, I am still wondering around inside the Pollination cloud.


Is this where (red rectangle) direct sunlight simulation result stored for ASE calculation?


Why when I downloaded the result it does not show the number, instead it gives NULL and characters that I don’t understand. It should have shown direct illuminance value above 1000 lux only if I am not mistaken right? the rest values remain in zero.

Unless you have 100s of CPUs waiting the two above solutions are very similar. Since the runs using Luigi will run the single task in parallel then you will be using all the available resources for a single scenario to finish faster. Once that scenario is finished you can run the next one and use all the resources.

As you can see in the header these files are in binary format. You can use Radiance to change them to ASCII and then you will be able to see the numbers.

I appreciate the explanation you have discussed. It is enriching my knowledge.