Issues with Non-Planar Surfaces and SunCast Grid Generation When Exporting from Pollination (Rhino) to IES VE

Rhino Plugin
1

Hi all,

I’m experiencing issues with geometry exported from Rhino via the Pollination plugin/ DumpgbXML gh node when importing into IES VE for analysis. Here’s a breakdown of the workflow and the problems encountered:

Geometry is modeled in Rhino with a 0.001 cm tolerance.
I attempted to export the model directly to .gem format using Pollination’s export tools, but this causes Rhino to freeze consistently.
I’ve been exporting to .gbXML, then importing that into IES VE.
In Rhino, I used Pollination’s tools to
Generate and align to the grid
Check planarity of faces
Check adjacencies

All checks pass and geometry appears correct within Rhino.

After exporting to gbXML and importing in IES VE
Many room faces are flagged as non-planar, despite appearing correct in Rhino. Non-planar surfaces show up in the tighter tolerance model report.
SunCast only works if the “HR Grid” is unchecked.

The model is relatively clean, and I’ve taken care to model using planar surfaces and regular geometry.
It seems that even though Pollination shows the geometry as valid, the exported gbXML does not meet IES VE’s stricter planarity checks, especially for SunCast.

Has anyone else run into similar issues? Is there a recommended export tolerance, or an additional cleanup step required before exporting from Pollination for use in IES VE?

Any help or tips would be appreciated!

Thanks

3

Hi @ipabob,

It’s hard to tell what’s happening without seeing your model. I won’t recommend using the gbXML format. I wonder what might be going on with your model that doesn’t export to GEM successfully. Can you share the model with us?

FYI, you can check for planarity of the faces by either using the PO_CheckPlanarity command or the PO_ValidateModel command.

4

Hi @ipabob, did you get a chance to try my suggestions? Let me know if you still need my help on this.