Keeping on with the automation trend, again with my workflow (maybe others also), I use Revit HVAC Zoning as a zonemap to know what spaces belong together for a thermal zone. This is the same zonemap I use for IESVE when having to move spaces to a zone and then combining the plenums (which is super slow).
The script from the plenum post used to autocreate the plenums, and somehow the zone parameter could be used to merge the plenums. Now the only thing is that when IESVE merges the plenums, it makes all the partitions that belong to the merged plenum and air boundary like in this example of 3 spaces in one zone
You would like the plenums of rooms within the same thermal zone to be merged together into a single plenum space with no partitions/air boundaries between them. Is that correct?
If that’s the case, this might be something that we automate differently than the other two since Pollination already has a concept of zoning, and we can add an option to the translation to merge the plenums for rooms on the same zone.
Let’s see what @chriswmackey thinks about this. I feel this is a common workflow and worth being an option in the standard export workflow.
Thanks again for post the automation requests! I’m very glad that you discovered this aspect of Pollination. It has been there for some time now, but we have been mostly using it for renaming rooms and moving models to the origin. These more advanced workflows make all the development worthwhile.
“You would like the plenums of rooms within the same thermal zone to be merged together into a single plenum space with no partitions/air boundaries between them. Is that correct?”
Yes, exactly. This ideally makes the plenum merging instantaneous rather than manually merging.
To second what @mostapha said, I think we can probably support an automated workflow for this at some point once we expose the “Zone” attribute of Rooms on the model editor UI. In the meantime, there is a way to get what you want in the Model Editor, which is a little manual but should be far quicker than using IESVE to manage the plenum geometry.
What you can do is that, after you have set up all of your plenum depths correctly, you can use Separate Plenums button at the top of the “Levels” table:
This will convert the plenum properties assigned to the rooms into real plenum rooms on their own plenum story, which you can see on the canvas of the model editor. From there, you can use the Merge Rooms command to merge the plenums together that are a part of the same zone. Then the plenum for each zone will be exported as a single room in the IESVE GEM.
Granted, we realize that this workflow is pretty manual and uni-directional. There isn’t an easy way to go back to a model with plenums assigned as attributes from the detailed plenum model. But, hopefully, this workflow can tide you over until we figure out how to expose (probably a few) options for how to merge zone geometry in the model editor. I think there are some people who want the option to merge all of the room geometry of the zone together into a single closed volume but I think we can support both this option and a “Merge Plenums Only” option.
