Views from sun

Often when producing a SEPP65 solar access analysis, you will want to generate views from the sun to visually verify the results of the Ladybug ‘heatmap’. This can be achieved with both Dynamo and Grasshopper. However, since the Ladybug Dynamo package is no longer being supported, see our Rhino.Inside Revit views from sun tutorial instead.

Dynamo workflow

Views in Revit can be achieved by using the ‘View.FromSun‘ custom node from the Parametric Monkey Dynamo Package. 

The custom node utilises the Clockwork package to calculate the orientation of True North and the Ladybug package to generate the sun vector for a given analysis period. Please note that Ladybug currently has a minor bug which results in returning extra dates/vectors from the analysis period. However, for this tutorial, this bug is not critical, and any additional views can be simply manually deleted as required. Finally, the custom node uses Dynamo’s native ‘AxonometricView.ByEyePointAndTarget’ node to generates 3D orthographic views.

To visually check that the node has worked as intended, you can turn on a view’s shadows. Then set the sun settings to ‘Still’ and set the date, time and location. If everything has worked correctly, you should not be able to see any shadows as the view is parallel to the sun. A neat feature of the ‘AxonometricView.ByEyePointAndTarget’ node is that the views generated will be locked. This setting will prevent any accidental orbiting of the view.

Grasshopper workflow

The same methodology can also be generated in Grasshopper using Ladybug and some Python. The Grasshopper script below will create ‘Named Views’ with the projection of the viewport set to ‘Parallel’. To run the script, activate the Boolean Toggle. This will trigger the ‘Ladybug_Fly’ component, which will animate a number sliders to produce the views.