Hello!
Last month I used Pollination to run a pretty large annual daylight simulation and would like to share the outcomes with everyone, along with some questions/suggestions:
Overview - The model was based on 4 residential towers with 20 stories each. I modeled the first two floors in detail, and the rest of the facade with generic surfaces. Since the towers are so closes to each other, I modeled all the facede windows to account for the impact on reflectance. The final honeybee model was made up of 9955 surfaces and 1556 apertures. I used 328 sensor grids, with a total of 21376 testpoints. Anyone interested in checking out the model in more detail, here is the URL: Pollination Cloud App . Here is a perspective of the model:
Results: The results for the simulation were pretty consistent with the same simulation I ran on my computer using ladybug tools, as expected. Since I was interested in looking at sDA 200 and not sDA 300, I had a bit of a hard time importing the results back into grasshopper and using the “HB Annual Daylight Metrics” componente. When downloading the results assets from pollination, I got 328 .ill files and one sun-up-hours file, which I had to combine in a tree structure. Not really that big of a problem, but it would be nice to able to get back theses result files from pollination in the same tree structure as we get using Lady Bug Tools to simulate locally.
Simulation Time: When simulating the same model on my Notebook (i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz with 16Gb of RAM) , it took around 10 hours, which is ok considering I had a pretty time consuming Radiance Parameter setup. On Pollination however, it took more than 24 horas to run the same thing. I’m not sure how long it actually took, because on the pollination dashboard it says 17 minutes (I think it reset after 24 hours simulating, which would be a nice fix for larger models.) I didn’t tweek the sensor-count because I still don’t understand how to ajust it in a way that it really helps. Any suggestions?
Pollination Cloud APP: Everything worked pretty well on the cloud APP, with the exception of the simulation time bug I mentioned, and the online model visualization, which didn’t work with a model this big (the site just crashes).
Final Thoughts: Despite the problems I mentioned above, I really liked the new workflow and will use it for sure in future projects. I am looking forward to seeing the colaboration features and final projects\simulations folder structure, as it is one of the major headaches I have managing a 8 person simulation team in our firm. It would be nice to have a easier input-output relation between the pollination downloaded assets and the Ladybug Tools results componentes, especially for things that aren’t that comum, such as a sDA 200 analysis. Also, I know this has been mentioned in the Ladybug forum in the past, but it would be great if there was a out-of-the-box ASE analysis for LEED compliance!!