Missing windows from "The Death Star"

Revit Plugin
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Hello Pollination Team,

I have a few items to mention and get some advice on, and will attach some images and files to help provide some material to digest on your side.

To start, I have noticed repeatedly needing to do this series of steps to get pollination to see a model. Can you let me know if there is a solution?

  1. Open architectural revit model
  2. Navigate to Pollination tab
  3. go to select Doors & Windows, Roofs, Export Rooms
  4. No host option or link showing in the pollination “Links”
  5. Save and Sync
  6. Close revit instance
  7. repeat steps 1-3
  8. Links automatically selecting Host
  9. Continue with selection process and snapshot creation.

Am I experiencing this issues because pollination needs to access the backup files or have the temporary local file to see the host? Would love to hear your thoughts on this. @mostapha

Now into the meat of this Topic:
Our team has been tasked to design within a hospital type building that has taken form of the death star. As cool as a circular building seems in reality, it seems to be causing some strange issues with some of the “lower roof” level glazing.
Revit overall 3d view:

image
image1271×809 70 KB

Pollination model preview of only glazing:
image
image977×731 29.6 KB

The glazing around the 2nd floor is seeming to be unseen on the upper wall. Glazing on “level 1” is hosted the same way, so I’m curious if you have any thoughts around why pollination is missing the glazing on “lower roof” level.

Here is the successful snapshot i was able to push through, with missing glazing on the entry and lower roof. (Side note, this was still very impressive to see pollination be able to take the 248 rooms and populate a model. I exported this to TRACE as a sniff check and ended up with a total envelope load of ~145 tons which seems reasonable, but that was with incomplete information):

image
image1906×1027 209 KB

2025-11-9–00-52-56_LIHC_Medical Clinic_A.pomf (427.6 KB)

And here is the detached arch model.

The goals with arch model are to:

  1. Create accurate snapshot (takes a long time to generate and seems important to increase step size to prevent Pollination from crashing)
  2. Clean up snapshot (I could not easily fill holes and solve adjacency, but didn’t try very long since I had other issues as well)
  3. generate both .TRACEXML and .GEM export files
  4. Populate a TRACE 700 model as well as an IES model.

I’d be happy to coordinate a video call to discuss some of the complications of this model. To have been able to generate a preliminary trace model was great, so I’m excited to see if Pollination will have the ability to refine and clean up with another set of eyes.

Cheers,

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Thank you for sharing all the information, Josiah! I’ll have a look this evening. This is one of those models that challenges most of the default features that we have developed for Pollination. That being said, we had to deal with many of them, and we developed a series of workflows to make it easy to deal with the elliptical and circular buildings.

P.S. Creative title! :smiley:

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Hi @josiahfce,

I’ll do a proper clean up of your snapshot with some recording tomorrow but for now, you could see the windows showing up if you change the Bounding Box Offset and Arc Subdivision Length to 4’ you will see all the windows on the model.

image
image1049×478 78.4 KB

Here is the entrance:

image
image699×687 25.7 KB

And the second floor:

image
image2434×1193 235 KB

Generating the 3D preview for this model is painfully slow, I’ll have a close look to better understand why it is too slow and report back.

In any case, we should be able to achieve the goals that you listed above. Give me a day and I will get back to you.

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Changing the Bounding Box Offset and Arc Subdivision Length seemed to work fairly well.

My 2nd floor reattempt seems to be missing about half of the windows above. I’m curious if you have an idea how to get the remaining ones to show up, albeit this may be close enough to manually enter the remaining windows for the Upper Lobby space.

And although I love my new snapshot, I’m getting an error in the Pollination (WIP) app for “Out of memory”
Is there a way I can get around that problem?
Here is my better snapshot than the one before.
2025-16-9–15-11-20_LIHC_Medical Clinic_A_detached_r24.pomf (2.6 MB)

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Hi @josiahfce,

Yes. You need an newer version of the plugin. We’ve been trying to support all the ways that people make windows on top of curved and slanted walls in Revit last week. The new version is much more improved in that sense.

Give me an hour or so, and I review this and send you a solution. The easiest way is to set you up with the new version of Model Editor which is much better than the existing version in handling larger models or models with many edges.

I will also share a link with you to the latest version of the Revit installer.

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Sounds great, looking forward to getting into the new plug in.
Thanks!

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Hi @josiahfce,

Thank you for sharing the PoMF file.

I cleaned up the model and exported them to TRACEXML and GEM. You can find the files below.

Out of memory issue

The reason for not being able to load the model is because your new snapshot includes these roofs with more then 10K faces.

image
image1920×1029 107 KB

This is how it looks like in the ME.

image
image1498×1401 199 KB

You should make sure they don’t get exported as part of the model by changing the export status to Do not export. The roof is almost horizontal and this adds unnecessary complexity.

The 3D preview slowness in the Revit plugin

This also explains why creating the 3D preview was super slow in the Revit plugin. It was trying to resolve the roof every single time. After removing the roofs everything works as expected.

Missing windows

This is a bug on our end. I will document it to ensure we will get this fixed. Even with all the improvements that we have made these windows are still not showing up as expected. It should be very fixable now that we have example.

For now, I solved the problem by setting up the Bounding Box Offset to a ridiculously high value to include all the windows from the center of the rooms.

image
image2714×1501 286 KB

Cleaning up the model

Here is the rest of the clean up in the ME V2. I particularly take advantage of the new coordinate vertices option in the align command.

Also, ignore my comment about the possible intersections when importing the GEM file. At this point, I’m too paranoid. It went through with no issues. :slight_smile:

Pollination Model
Pollination Model1920×1415 148 KB

TraceXML
TraceXML1920×1126 111 KB

IESVE
IESVE1882×882 105 KB

Here is the cleaned up PoMF, GEM, and TRACEXML models.

the-death-star.pomf (475.3 KB)
the-death-star.gem (305.6 KB)
the-death-star.xml (4.1 MB)

Here a re the shades in case you want to add them to the IESVE model.

shades.pomf (129.2 KB)

Let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. I will reach out to set you up with Model Editor V2 in a day or two.

P.P.S. As always, thank you for including all the necessary information in your topic. I can’t express how helpful it is. Thank you! :slight_smile:

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