Wednesday, June 11, 2008

export to IES - LFRT follow-up

While at the LFRT meeting I gave a presentation on our use of IES at Burt Hill, specifically I profiled this project. Phil Read raised an interesting question, he has long preached the use of thin basics walls to function as a simple "curtain wall" rather then dealing with the more complex curtain wall tool. However, in discussing how Revit data is ported from Revit to IES he asked how would his "fake" curtain walls be handled. Not knowing for sure, I've gone back and done a simple test. The unforunate answer is, that fake curtain walls don't work.


IES looks to internal properties of objects in Revit to determine if they are a "solid" or if they are transparent. So therefore it knows that a Revit curtain wall should let light through, and it knows that a window will too. However it expects that walls will be solid. The material that has been mapped to the wall does not matter in this case. As you can, once this simple model is brought into the IES dialog, we're left with only one opening that reveals the space volume.

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