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Daylight and Visible Sky Component calculations in Vectorworks


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Here in the UK (and I assume elsewhere) it's often necessary, as a part of planning applications, to make daylight calculations and "visible sky component" calculations either for windows on new developments or on existing buildings that might be affected by a new development.

 

The traditional way of doing this is to use the "Skylight Indicator" diagrams that look a bit like this:

 

9781860813252.jpg

 

There also seem to be plugins for Sketchup that allow you to do it using 3d modelling:

 

https://www.lightup-analytics.com/

 

Is there anything within Vectorworks (or available as a plugin?) that can do this, that I might not be aware of?

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6 hours ago, rDesign said:

The Heliodon tool can do simple Solar Studies and animations of the sunlight path on a building over time, but I don't think it can create visible sky component diagrams like you requested.

 

The Heliodon tool doesn't help you create diagrams that how your proposed building is going to affect the solar access on adjacent properties. 

Hi Maybe I don't follow what you require here but we model the surrounding buildings and can see what affect the proposed development has on the surrounding buildings. in 3d Council wants to see if the amount of sun on any window or into a courtyard has changed and this will do this. This is what we need to obtain approval from the Authority.

Maybe your authority is different?

Capture.JPG

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On 22/12/2016 at 9:44 PM, line-weight said:

Here in the UK (and I assume elsewhere) it's often necessary, as a part of planning applications, to make daylight calculations and "visible sky component" calculations either for windows on new developments or on existing buildings that might be affected by a new development.

 

The traditional way of doing this is to use the "Skylight Indicator" diagrams that look a bit like this:

 

9781860813252.jpg

 

There also seem to be plugins for Sketchup that allow you to do it using 3d modelling:

 

https://www.lightup-analytics.com/

 

Is there anything within Vectorworks (or available as a plugin?) that can do this, that I might not be aware of?

These diagrams are perspectives looking straight up from the point of interest so in theory you should be able to set up a camera with the right settings to match. 

 

That said havent tried it in Vectorworks since minicad and it didn't work then.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 22/12/2016 at 10:38 PM, Alan Woodwell said:

Hi Maybe I don't follow what you require here but we model the surrounding buildings and can see what affect the proposed development has on the surrounding buildings. in 3d Council wants to see if the amount of sun on any window or into a courtyard has changed and this will do this. This is what we need to obtain approval from the Authority.

Maybe your authority is different?

 

 

Yes, the requirements are different.

 

But also, what I'm talking about here is Visible Sky Component - the amount of sky visible from a certain location. This is different from analysis of direct sunlight and shading.

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On 27/12/2016 at 9:22 PM, Matt Overton said:

These diagrams are perspectives looking straight up from the point of interest so in theory you should be able to set up a camera with the right settings to match. 

 

That said havent tried it in Vectorworks since minicad and it didn't work then.

 

Good point, maybe something to try although I imagine it could get very complicated to make a perspective view exactly match those diagrams (and prove that it really did).

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On 13/01/2017 at 0:15 PM, line-weight said:

 

Good point, maybe something to try although I imagine it could get very complicated to make a perspective view exactly match those diagrams (and prove that it really did).

 

Best take so far is the attached.

Circles are set at 10º intervals and in principle it's working.

Seems the camera is fairly adverse to pointing straight up in the air. So you have to manually set the 3D view, also it's hard to set the view field so not confident yet its showing all it should.

Also, have to play with perspective so see if I can't get circles evenly spaced like a lot of the diagrammes do. 

Heliodon.vwx

Screen Shot 2017-01-16 at 2.35.16 pm.png

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18 hours ago, Matt Overton said:

Best take so far is the attached.

Circles are set at 10º intervals and in principle it's working.

Seems the camera is fairly adverse to pointing straight up in the air. So you have to manually set the 3D view, also it's hard to set the view field so not confident yet its showing all it should.

Also, have to play with perspective so see if I can't get circles evenly spaced like a lot of the diagrammes do. 

Heliodon.vwx

Screen Shot 2017-01-16 at 2.35.16 pm.png

Interesting... the key is to confidently match it to the whatever diagrams are specified as the ones to satisfy whatever test is being done.

 

In my case, I've ended up doing it using a Waldram diagram (drawing in VW over a PDF template) which is an alternative method. Still involves a lot of manual plotting though.

 

It appears that there are plugins for Autocad and Sketchup that can automate this to some extent.... one for VW would certainly be a big time-saver.

 

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On 16/01/2017 at 11:27 PM, Matt Overton said:

Have to do a lot more testing in order to get my own confidence up. Would certainly be useful if we can prove it works or find why it doesn't.

I had a bit of a mess around with your file. I think all you need in theory is a camera lens at the dead centre of your hemisphere, looking directly upwards with a field of view of 180 degrees? But then it has to project onto a hemispherical "film" whereas I assume VW cameras project onto a flat plane which would give you an infinitely sized image if you did the whole 180 degrees.

 

I think maybe it's just not possible to set that up with the VW cameras. But, cameras and linked viewports and so on have always confused me. Why does a renderworks camera have a totally different bunch of settings from those for a perspective viewport? What does perspective distance actually mean? etc etc. I need to get my head around all that.

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