Rhino Plugin Commands for Environmental Analyses

Hello, wonderful Pollination community,

We have a new feature that will be particularly appreciated by those of you run environmental analyses with the Ladybug Grasshopper plugin or who have been looking to expand the usage of these analyses in your office. The latest Pollination Rhino plugin has a series of new Rhino commands for the most common types of Ladybug environmental analyses, all of which are organized into a toolbar that can be loaded to the Rhino interface.

Workflow

This makes things like pulling up a Sunpath practically instantaneous. Just hit the button, paste a weather URL and behold! A Sunpath!

PO_Sunpath Command

Using the options of the command, you will find that many of the customizations that you might make to your climate graphics in Grasshopper (eg. scale, center point, projection, even plotting EPW data) can be done right on the Rhino command with far less setup time.

The new commands also turn studies like direct sun and radiation into an easy 3-step process that anyone can follow no matter their level of Grasshopper experience:

PO_DirectSun Command

With the ability to bake the results to the Rhino document as an editable “analysis mesh,” you’ll find that all of your favorite Legend Parameter options (min, max, colors, decimal places, etc.) are fully supported without the need to use Grasshopper.

Getting Started

If you want a summary that walks through the commands and their capabilities, this tutorial video should give you all that you need:

Next Steps

Many of you might notice that there are only 14 Environmental Analysis commands yet Ladybug Grasshopper supports dozens of different climate visualizations and analyses. So we intend to add more of these Environmental Analysis commands in the future.

But we could use feedback from you, wonderful community, about which visualizations are most important to you so that we can prioritize our efforts. We would also like to know generally how useful these commands are in your workflows. You can probably already sense that there’s nothing that these commands can do that you cannot already do in Ladybug Grasshopper. But we hope that the speed with which you can now pull up graphics like a Sunpath makes it much easier to use these graphics as communication tools during the design and building simulation process. And, of course, we’re very interested to know how accessible these commands are to your team members who don’t use Grasshopper.

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Great idea and useful
Très boone idée et très pratique

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Hi @chris,
Thanks a lot for all these gifts. They are great.
Besides the Psychrometric and such tat you mentioned in the video, one more tool that i can think can be nice to have now is the SkyMask.

-A.

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Sounds great, but how do we actually install the extra icons. I can’t see them in the latest Pollination version (downloaded last week).

Hi @robm, they should be included in the release.

Can you try to type PO_Sunpath and see if the command is available?

image

If that’s the case, and you don’t see the icons click on the settings gear. Then click on Show Toolbar, and scroll down to Environmental Analysis.

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@chriswmackey this looks like an excellent addition. The assumption here is we’ve all installed (bought?) pollination on Rhino (which I haven’t. The reason here is primarily because I need to wrap my head around what polination is.
I fully understand what is said pollination does and I can cmprehend it’s capabilities for interapolibility and APIs, self-developed apps etc. But honestly all these notions are new to me and I do not get their meanings, and hence the power of pollination, at a deeper level.
Simultaneously, pollination has advanced rapidly on different fronts and it is difficult to know where a logical entry point for newbee ought to be. My specific question: is there a specific set of tutorials to guide a beginner to understand what is pollination and it’s power, the basics and their application after which one which can find/ put together a scaffold for getting deeper into the pollination ecosystem to generate yet more value? [e.g. Ref Chris Mackey’s original Ladybug and Honeybee tutorial series].

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Hi @sanya, these are very good questions. Give me a bit of time to come back from vacation, and I will get back to you in a separate post. The multi-product nature of Pollination is confusing, and it took us some time to understand how to position each product to make it easy for everyone to understand them. Let’s see if we can do better this time. :slight_smile:

Hey @sanya ,

As Mostapha said, we should probably open up a separate post to help clarify some things about the multi-product nature of Pollination. The products tab of our website can probably help clarify things a little, though the website is also in need of an update,.

For now, I’ll just answer this simpler question:

Yes, as I say in the tutorial video, these “Environmental Analysis” commands are only available with the Pollination Rhino plugin. So you’re either bought a Pollination Rhino license, you’re using the 14-day free trial, or you’ve bought an educational license, which is exactly the same at the commercial one but we give a (rather large) discount.

And I’ll also clarify that your best entry point is going to vary depending upon where you are coming from and what your biggest pain points are now. If you have been a Ladybug Tools user but you have struggled to build large building performance models in Grasshopper that are clean/valid, then the Pollination Rhino plugin is definitely the best place to start. Or if you find yourself running the same simple Ladybug studies for your colleagues in your office just because they don’t know Grasshopper, the Pollination Rhino plugin is going to be a helpful tool. The Getting Started Sections of our User Manual will give you some tutorials if you want to start getting deeper.

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This is an amazing feature to add. Many of my colleague not comfortable in GH will be very happy to see these features!

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Hello,
I really like the new environmental analyses commands.
It would be really nice to have a manual with short descriptions of what each command/analysis does and how could be beneficial to the design decision process.
Thank you for the great job! :slight_smile:
Regards,

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