# Pollination Progress Report - July 2023

**URL:** <https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839>\
**Category:** Announcements\
**Created:** [July 3, 2023, 9:31pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839 "2023-07-03T21:31:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/user_avatar/discourse.pollination.solutions/mostapha/32/5761_2.png) [@mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/u/mostapha)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2023, 9:31pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839/1 "2023-07-03T21:31:10Z")

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Hello :pollination: community!

It has been around 6 months since we shared our [development roadmap for 2023](https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/pollination-development-roadmap-for-2023/2260) with you. It is about time to give an update on our progress during the last 6 months and share the next steps for the rest of the year. It will also be a great opportunity to hear your feedback. I will go through the list of the tasks later in this topic but I want to highlight the item that I believe was our most important achievement so far in 2023.

**I believe we have finally proven to the AE community that automated interoperability workflows between CAD/BIM and building performance simulation are a reliable, faster, and overall better alternative to redrawing the models from scratch.**

As industry professionals ourselves, we know how unreliable and unpredictable the automated interoperability solutions have been over the last decade so we knew we would have an uphill battle to win everyone’s trust. I believe we made great progress on this topic by helping companies to use the Rhino and the Revit plugins for creating analytical models for their real ongoing projects. We heard from several users that they were skeptical to try yet another interoperability solution and they are now surprised that it works!

The plugins are not _yet_ perfect but they are predictable. That makes it possible to rely on them for projects under pressing deadlines. We still have several items on our list (for the Revit plugin in particular), which will make the process even faster and more reliable but we know we are in a good place when we get questions like this one.

[https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/model-geometry-discussion-balancing-model-details-and-rooms-for-load-calculations-versus-energy-modeling/2474](https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/model-geometry-discussion-balancing-model-details-and-rooms-for-load-calculations-versus-energy-modeling/2474)

We are moving from the I-can’t-build-a-model-fast-enough problem to this-is-now-too-flexible-and-I’m-building-very-large-models problem! That’s a great problem to have! The last time that I had to deal with a similar pattern [DesignExplorer](http://tt-acm.github.io/DesignExplorer/) was born! I’m excited to see where we will end up with this new challenge.

Thank you for trusting us, investing in us, and helping us through the process. We are looking forward to continuing our work to build the Pollination CAD plugins as the trustworthy interoperability hub for building performance simulation.

Now off to the list of items for each Pollination product. 👇

## Rhino Plugin

Here is the list of features that we had on our roadmap.

- **Add new repairing routines, and improve the existing ones** ✅

- **Improve interoperability with other simulation tools** ✅ ✅

- **Improve interoperability with Ladybug Tools Grasshopper plugins** ✅ ✅

- **Streamline the process to run the simulations and visualize the results** ✅ ✅

- **Improve the documentation** ✅

- **Provide better solutions for detailed HVAC simulation** ✅

- **Provide better solutions to create and share custom standards libraries** 📈

## Revit Plugin

- **Develop more forgiving solutions for exporting models** ✅✅

- **Improve the solve adjacency routines** ✅ ✅

- **Improve automated repairing routines** ✅

- **Streamline the process to run the simulations and visualize the results** ✅ ✅

## Cloud Computing

- **Optimize the execution of running short-lived steps and small models** ✅ ✅

- **Implement better queueing for large parametric studies** 📈

- **Provide simple solutions for customizing existing recipes** 📈

## Apps

As I mentioned in the original post, Apps are the only Pollination product that are still in beta. From the original list, we have made several improvements to make it easier to build Pollination apps using Streamlit. We have also improved the start-up time for paid apps. If you pay for an app, you now get the option to keep them running all the time, which effectively solves the issue with the slow start-up time.

With that said, we had an important realization. Although Streamlit is a great framework to build simple apps, it might not be the best fit to build larger apps with constant interactions with the CAD plugins. That’s why we have started looking into supporting Dash as an alternative framework to Streamlit. The progress has been promising and we will continue to work on the infrastructure.

We are also planning to release a couple of new apps for early design studies that have been requested by several users. We just want to make sure that, when we release them, they are good enough to be used for real projects.

## Recipes

Creating new recipes was not on our initial roadmap but we added them to the list based on the requests from you. We released 3 recipes for LEED daylight and energy.

- [https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/appendix-g-leed-energy-recipe-and-ironbug-integration/2412](https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/appendix-g-leed-energy-recipe-and-ironbug-integration/2412)
- [https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/leed-daylight-option-ii-is-now-publicly-available-on-pollination/2581](https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/leed-daylight-option-ii-is-now-publicly-available-on-pollination/2581)
- [https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/leed-daylight-option-i-is-now-publicly-available-on-pollination/2459](https://discourse.pollination.cloud/t/leed-daylight-option-i-is-now-publicly-available-on-pollination/2459)

We also released a recipe for [annual daylight EN17037](https://app.pollination.cloud/ladybug-tools/recipes/annual-daylight-en17037) and we are working on releasing a more efficient version of the annual daylight and annual irradiance recipes.

## What is next?

For the rest of the year, we will mainly work on the tasks that I listed above. We are committed to improving and iterating as many times as it takes to make sure that you can create/extract your analytical models from CAD/BIM environments in an acceptable timeframe. We also want to ensure you have access to validated simulation recipes, which can be run locally or on the cloud as you see fit. Lastly, we intend to empower you with the ability to visualize and communicate the results of the simulations effectively, such that you can impact the design process and improve the built environment.

We have one more item on the list that I have not listed above but we learned during this year and we are planning to work on it. We have discussed developing a Radiance-only option for exporting the models from Revit. Our current parsing routine is primarily optimized for energy modeling, which is indeed the harder of the two, but we have seen a few customers who want to use their models only for daylight simulation and we have plans to implement faster workflows for that are geared toward this pathway.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback/thoughts/advice! Let us know how you feel about the progress, what you have enjoyed from Pollination, and what areas can be improved. We always look forward to hearing your feedback and, if you check this forum, you know that we listen to it and we will implement features to address it! You can leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via email. I’m looking forward to the rest of 2023!

Thank you for using Pollination, and supporting us on this journey to fix the interoperability issues for building performance simulation.

Happy Pollinating! :pollination:

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**Author:** ![mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/user_avatar/discourse.pollination.solutions/mostapha/32/5761_2.png) [@mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/u/mostapha)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2023, 9:32pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839/2 "2023-07-03T21:32:07Z")

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Pinned globally on July 3, 2023, 9:32pm UTC



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**Author:** ![justinshultz](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/user_avatar/discourse.pollination.solutions/justinshultz/32/5937_2.png) [@justinshultz](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/u/justinshultz)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2023, 1:09pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839/3 "2023-07-05T13:09:40Z")

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> [@mostapha](#):
>
> We have discussed developing a Radiance-only option for exporting the models from Revit. Our current parsing routine is primarily optimized for energy modeling, which is indeed the harder of the two, but we have seen a few customers who want to use their models only for daylight simulation and we have plans to implement faster workflows for that are geared toward this pathway.

Excited to hear more about this! There is a popular tool on the market that had a superb export process for daylight, even from Revit. Would love to see some competition!

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**Author:** ![enyahughes](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/user_avatar/discourse.pollination.solutions/enyahughes/32/8201_2.png) [@enyahughes](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/u/enyahughes)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2024, 1:51pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839/4 "2024-06-05T13:51:25Z")

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These are some great developments, looking forward to the next update!  
Trace 3D is a program that many of us are using, since Trace 700 was a relied upon method for doing HVAC heat load calculations. Interoperability with Trace 3D would be a huge game changer. Can we schedule a meeting to discuss, and see if there’s a way I can help and vice versa? Thanks so much!

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**Author:** ![mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/user_avatar/discourse.pollination.solutions/mostapha/32/5761_2.png) [@mostapha](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/u/mostapha)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2024, 2:24pm UTC](https://discourse.pollination.solutions/t/pollination-progress-report-july-2023/2839/5 "2024-06-05T14:24:05Z")

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Hi @enyahughes, thank you for offering help! We finally found a contact from TRANE who we will talk to soon. I will keep you posted on the progress. 🤞