Feature Request: View3D- import/export automation or scripts

[Atmos-lab]

Issue overview

Hi all,

With the increasing importance given to comfort calculations during building design the temperature of any given surface becomes essential to accurately calculate operative temperatures. However, Energyplus limitations with Interior Solar Distributions for convex zones restricts considerably the typologies that can be assessed or, alternatively, requires them to be broken down into smaller non-convex zones (with the impact this brings to other heat exchange effects).

I´m aware that an additional tool comes with E+, View3D, but it requires the manual input of geometry (zone by zone) to output viewfactor objects that can be used as E+ objects (ZoneProperty:UserViewFactors:bySurfaceName).

It would be really helpful to have an automated process to link E+ with View3D, to call this tool when E+ identifies a non-convex zone. Automating geometry export/import to View3D would also be a leap forward and allow us to skip the Excel interface on a per-zone basis.

Some use cases where this is currently a limitation:

• Office buildings: Design of exposed concrete floors where their temperature and thermal mass is critical for user comfort. So far, convex zones assign all the solar gains to the floor (if I´m not mistaken).
• Residential buildings with glazed balconies/wintergardens: thermal zones (non-convex) representing Wintergardens do not allow incident solar radiation to go through them, as all the gains are assigned to the floor instead of the internal windows facing the apartment.

Given that View3D is already developed, it would be great to expose its functionality to more users by making it easier and faster to use. I´m new to this forum and, certainly, not aware of the effort or implications this development may require (I´m not a software developer myself), but I really thought it would be a useful feature to have. Please forgive me if this is not the right forum for such a request.

Link to Unmethours thread: https://unmethours.com/question/41802/how-to-use-e-view3d-tool/

Many thanks in advance, Rafael

[Atmos-lab]

To keep everyone informed and avoid duplicated efforts, I´ll leave below two links that overlap with this thread.

Radiance developers have recently updated eplus_adduvf.exe tool, which is meant to automatically solve the solar distribution limitation by adding view factors to the idf. It hasn´t been rolled out yet, but hopefully it will be the solution to this issue.

https://discourse.radiance-online.org/t/how-to-use-adduvf-exe/5054/6

https://unmethours.com/question/42331/downgrade-idf-9x-to-7x-viewfactor-calculation-using-radiance-eplus_adduvfexe/?answer=42383#post-id-42383

[rafael-a]

Another update here, as the implementation of eplus_adduvf.exe is already working thanks to the efforts of Radiance developers here:

https://discourse.radiance-online.org/t/how-to-use-adduvf-exe/5054/6

However, this does not solve the limitation of EnergyPlus with interior solar distributions for non-convex zones. Is there something I'm missing?