How to set Global Construction Set

I would like to specify the Global Construction Set, instead of applying a Construction Set to each Room individually.

Is there a way to set the Global Construction Set in the Rhino Plugin?

When I open the Construction Set Manager, there are many options listed, how do I set the default? Is it based on the Construction Set I have selected in the Manager and then clicking “OK”?

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Hi @justinshultz,

The Global Construction Set is designed as the last safeguard to ensure all geometries get a valid constitution for simulation, and it is by design that the Global Construction Set cannot be overridden by the HoneybeeSchema.

I think @chriswmackey can fill in more details here.

Interesting. That is backward from my understanding of how OpenStudio used Building level Construction Sets. I would like to better understand this decision.

Probably we should add a new one for Building level Construction Sets.

Building construction sets exist in the Dragonfly plugin where there’s the possibility of having several buildings in one model. But the coarsest object that you can work with in Honeybee is the Room and there’s no such thing as a “building object” in honeybee schema. So just apply the construction set to all of your Honeybee Rooms if you want to have your model structured like a building-level construction set.

Hi @justinshultz, does the solution that is suggested by @chriswmackey provides what you need? You can basically select all the rooms and set them to use your default construction set. Or do you have other use cases that it is required/preferred to modify the global construction set?

I understand the reasoning but it seems like an extra step when the whole building has the same Construction Set or Program Type. It’s not a problem, but doesn’t align with OpenStudio’s Building level definition. Larger models take a bit of time to select all the rooms at once and apply a ConstructionSet or ProgramType. Not a deal breaker but a nice quality of life option.

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Thank you, @justinshultz for providing this additional information! Let us have a discussion about this internally and evaluate the options and get back to you.

Thank you for the feedback, @justinshultz and I understand the request but there are also several “quality of life” changes for the worse that would happen by trying to support a Building-level ConstructionSet in Honeybee schema. Arguably the most severe one is that it becomes much harder to deconstruct models into individual rooms to edit them or merge models into each other when the properties or Rooms can change depending on which model they are a part of.

A lot of the things that make the Pollination Rhino plugin really good at preparing geometry for simulation are the result of the deconstruct-ability of models into individual Honeybee Rooms.

So, if the edit-ability of the global construction set is a pain point, it’s much more preferable if you edited the BuildingConstructionSet with a measure once the model is already over in an OSM format and we’re no longer as concerned about deconstruct-abiltiy into Rooms. There’s already support for measures in the energy simulation recipes and we can probably expose it in the “Save As OSM” dialog at some point.

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We just improved the speed for the selection of the rooms and you can select them quickly for larger models and assign the construction set for all of them in one go. Let us know if we can do anything else to make this easier for you.

@chriswmackey These are some pretty significant changes and impacts. I agree, a building level ConstructionSet is not worth all these changes. Thank you for the valuable insight.

@mostapha thank you for the quick update. I’ll check out the update prior to my next project.

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