<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Mar 11, 2009, at 6:09 PM, Ross Harding wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div lang="EN-AU" link="blue" vlink="blue"><div class="Section1"><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(20, 79, 174); font-size: 12px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">The ultimate goal for us would be to use one model for daylight and energy models, but I haven’t found that quite that simple as most software requires varying drawing techniques.</span></div></div></div></span></blockquote><br></div><div>Amen brother! Another issue is that while the energy model has to include the total building -- all spaces and systems -- to be a complete picture of the energy use, a Radiance-based daylight model does not necessarily require all the spaces to be modeled simultaneously. Indeed, the accuracy of the ambient calculation is directly affected by the maximum size of the scene, and so conducting a simultaneous daylight simulation of an entire building at an acceptably rigorous ambient resolution can be -- is generally -- time-prohibitive.</div><div><br></div><div>As mentioned in a recent thread on this list, Thomas Bleicher's "su2rad" plugin for SketchUp can export a SU model to Radiance format and there is also an E+ plugin to allow one to use the same SU model for E+ analysis; in theory, these three components (SketchUp, su2rad and the E+ plugin) allow for a "single model" approach to energy and daylight modeling. However, because the su2rad exporter wants to take the entire model and create a single Radiance scene description, that creates the aforementioned problem of the ambient calculation getting out of hand fairly quickly. I suppose through intelligent layering and model structuring, one could create a model that could be exported to Radiance in "space components", but I'm not sure if this is compatible with the E+ plugin's layering/model organization requirements.</div><div><br></div><div>- Rob Guglielmetti</div></body></html>