Preamble

Urban Daylight v.01 Beta allows designers to simulate and evaluate the daylight potential of urban master plan proposals. In a two-step workflow, hourly solar radiation levels on all facades within an urban scene are simulated (Daysim) and then translated into hourly interior illuminance distributions using a generalized impulse response. Climate based day-lighting metrics, such as “Daylight Autonomy”, and “Spatial Daylight Autonomy” that are required for LEED, are also computed.

This novel approach introduces a method that is up to 100 times faster than the standard Daysim/Radiance approach. Additionally, the workflow is streamlined and the model setup is fully automated to make large architectural models manageable. For the first time, it becomes possible to evaluate the daylight potential of urban designs within a feasible amount of time. The hourly results and the satisfactory precision of 7-18% for the interior illuminace and 3.8 – 10% for the climate based metrics allow us to study urban designs in great detail easily.

Prerequisites

McNeel Rhino 5 must be installed. If you would like to use the Grasshopper component McNeel Grasshopper for Rhino 5 has to be installed as well.

Installation

Urban Daylight can be downloaded form www.archsim.com.

Run the installer “UD_setup.exe”. The installer will create a folder under your “C:” drive called UD. The folder should have the following content.

The files highlighted by box “1” are the Grasshopper components. Place these files into your Grasshopper add-ons folder. You can navigate to that folder by launching Grasshopper. Click on: File->Special Folders->Components Folder

Cut and paste the files from box “1” into this folder.
In order to install the Rhino plug-in you have to drag and drop the files in box “2“ into a Rhino viewport.

After the Installation

After installing the Rhino plug-in and the Grasshopper plug-in you should see the UrbanDaylight tool-bars.

Rhino Toolbar

Grasshopper Toolbar

Next: Example File