Hello and thank you for joining public BETA access!
After working on Pollination for over a year, we are so excited to have you use and test our platform! A huge thank you to all our early access users, who helped us work out major bugs before opening Pollination up to a larger audience. As you start using Pollination, you will notice that there are still missing features, like our web-based result visualization, recipe builder, and some of our CAD plugins. We are working on them and they will be released during the public BETA period.
In the meantime, Pollination is ready for your real world projects and real world problems. Start using it to see how it can transform simulation and collaboration workflows on your high performance design projects.
Our goals for public BETA access
We want Pollination to deliver excellence and to be excellent we need your feedback! We want to hear from you; the good and the bad! With your help we can build tools that last for a long time and solve real-world problems. If there is anything that is missing from Pollination that is critical for you and your team to start using Pollination please let us know! Use this forum to report any bugs, provide feedback, and ask for new features. To ensure a timely response please post your questions under the right category. You can see all the categories here .
Thank you for being part of the journey!
Features of Pollination
Functional
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Pollination Web app: Our web app is mostly functional. You can create projects, build teams, add and remove recipes, and organize your runs. In addition, since the web app is using Pollination API it is a great resource for developers to see how every step of the process works. We have a long list of improvements for the web app that we will be working on during public BETA. In the meantime, the core functionalities of Pollination are available for your use.
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Pollination REST API: If you want to build a new application to use Pollination or integrate your current applications check out our API and SDKs below.
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Pollination Grasshopper plugin: Download the latest version from our website and get yourself started by watching the video tutorials videos.
Make sure you are using the latest developer version of Ladybug Tools 1.2.0. -
Pollination Rhino plugin: Our Rhino plugin is ready for WIP release! We aren’t ready for a direct download from our website yet, so look out for a link to download on discourse coming soon!
Coming soon
- Pollination Revit plugin: The Revit plugin is slated for WIP release in early to mid August! You can preview our workflow for converting from Building Information Modeling (BIM) to Building Energy Modeling (BEM) here! Stay tuned!
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Pollination web-based results visualization: While we currently have a web-viewer for visualizing input models, we don’t yet have one for visualization results. We are in the process of integrating Pollination with Kitware and VTK platforms.
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Pollination web-based recipe builder: We are also planning to change the current recipe viewer to be a recipe builder so you can edit the current recipes or create your own. If you are in a rush here is how we currently develop our recipes . The animation below shows what the recipe builder will look like.
What are your resources?
User Manual
Check out the Pollination User Manual that we recently published to our site. Make this your first stop to learn how to get started with Pollination. You can find guidance on how to create organizations, projects, teams, and much more in the User Manual. We are trying our best to keep current and new sections will be added as products and features are added to the Pollination platform.
Blog
You can read more about Pollination and the principles behind the decisions that we made on our website. Here are a number of posts to get you started:
- Principles of Pollination
- The problem with simulation automation
- Our solution to the two-week turn-around problem
Make sure to follow us on Twitter , on Linkedin, and if you haven’t already please subscribe to our newsletter to keep yourself updated. We will also use this forum and the #announcements category provide updates.
:pollination: API and SDKs
If you are going to use Pollination API directly or one of the Pollination SDKs our developer quickstart is the best place to get you started.
pollination/guides
Developer guides for interacting with Pollination.
Here are a links to Pollination API documentation:
Most of your questions and comments probably belongs to #dev category! → will see you there!
FAQ
How does public BETA compare to early access?
They are very similar except for the number of available parallel processes for each account. Every account will be afforded a generous amount of cloud computing and storage. It is unlikely that you will run out of your assigned compute hours, but let us know if that happens and we will see what we can do.
You can create up to 10 private projects and 3 private repository for private recipes and plugins. You can add up to 20 accounts to your organization and build up to 5 teams.
When does public beta period end?
We are currently planning to end public access mid October 2021. As always, we will make sure to communicate any major changes ahead of time.
Do you already have a pricing?
We got a ton of feedback on pricing during early access, so we are currently incorporating pricing feedback. As soon as we have a revised pricing chart we will share it on Discourse.
What recipes are currently available on Pollination?
You can see all the list of all the publicly available recipes here on Pollination. It includes most of the basic recipes that you would expect including annual energy use, annual daylight, daylight factor, direct sun hours and comfort map recipes!
Can I write my own recipe without the web-based recipe builder?
Yes. You can use pollination-dsl to develop your own plugins and recipes. You will need to know Python and develop a command line interface for all the commands that you are trying to use. See this post for more information:
pollination/pollination-dsl
How-to-write-your-first-recipe-for-Pollination
A Python library for creating Pollination plugins and recipes.
We understand that this is not for everyone, so if this is not your cup of tea, the wait for our web-based recipe builder will be worth it!
Can I use Pollination Revit and Rhino plugins without Pollination cloud computing?
Yes. The Rhino and Revit plugin will be shipped with a number of selected recipes that can be executed locally. You can also use it as your graphical interface to create clean energy and daylight models and export them to your platform of choice. You can export the files as HBJSON, IDF, OSM, gbXML and Radiance file or folder.