Archives

gModeller — Comments Off on Introducing gModeller V1.6 – With Energy+ Support
19
Apr 12

Introducing gModeller V1.6 – With Energy+ Support

Today, we released version 1.6 of gModeller!

gModeller V1.6

gModeller V1.6 contains a number of bug fixes, and user interface tweaks, and we have also included Energy+ support!

Energy+ Support

With the Energy+ extension to SketchUp you can now model your building in Google SketchUp, add building properties using gModeller and then perform an energy analysis of the model using Energy+, directly from within SketchUp. You can also export an Energy+ IDF file in order to carry out more advanced Energy+ analyses on your model, and this can be used in a number of Energy+ focused downstream tools. This is in addition to being able to export your SketchUp model as gbXML which can be used in a large variety of downstream analysis tools!

Energy+ in gModeller

Energy+ Options in gModeller

The Energy+ extension to gModeller is still at a Beta level of development, and is not quite complete yet. This means that the functionality is not fully complete, and at the moment provides support for model geometry and constructions, we are still working on implementing system handling and other functionality required to carry out a full Energy+ analysis. Because the Energy+ extension is still in beta, it may contain some bugs and other small glitches when analysing models. However, we are really excited about this functionality in gModeller and thought we would share it with you. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions on this, and we will be updating gModeller with more fully featured Energy+ features soon.

Other Updates

gModeller V1.6 also contains a number of other usability and bug fixes as listed below:

  • Improved Mac OS X Support – gModeller should work much better on Mac OS X. Installing on Mac OS X is now much easier and does not require your Flash Player Security settings to be modified.
  • Improved gbXML import – importing gbXML in gModeller is now faster, and more reliable on both Windows and Mac OS X.
  • Improved surface attribution materials – we’ve updated the building surface attribution materials in gModeller and fixed some issues with these in Mac OS X.
  • Slight user interface changes.
  • Fixed some issues with logging in and out of gModeller.
  • Added more constructions and materials to the Construction library section – this is important for Energy+ support!
  • More…
To begin using the latest versions of gModeller, you’ll need to download and install gModeller for Windows or gModeller for Mac OS X from our website. You will then be able to log into gModeller using your GreenspaceLive account and begin modelling. If you don’t have a GreenspaceLive account, please visit our website to register for a free trial!
We hope you enjoy this latest version of gModeller and would love to hear your feedback!

– Malcolm Murray, Product Manager

 

General — Comments Off on Describing buildings
01
Sep 11

Describing buildings

A house of cards, built by robots.“In need of some modernisation.”
“Many period features.”
“Compact and bijou.”

There are many ways to describe a building (particularly if you are an estate agent) but when it comes to pinning down exactly how much energy it’s using — and how energy use can be minimised — then you need to be much more precise.

Many modern energy analysis tools approach this problem by having you construct a 3-D model.

One problem with this approach is that each of these tools have their own interfaces, and you often need to spend a substantial amount of time learning how they work (and how to avoid their quirks).

Another problem is that they are often closed systems. Even if you already have a 3-D model created somewhere else, it may not be possible to import it. And once your masterwork of a model is created in one tool, you generally cannot reuse it in another one.

At GreenspaceLive we believe in collaboration. We also believe in second (and third, and fourth) opinions when searching for energy-efficient and low-carbon solutions.

That’s why our approach to modelling (gModeller) uses Google Sketchup: no new tools or difficult paradigms to master, no awkward interfaces to learn your way around. Just Google’s ridiculously easy-to-use — and free — modelling tool.

To that, we’ve added the ability to export (and import) the model in gbXML format. gbXML is an open standard, and is a vendor-neutral way of describing a building (it’s a bit like the PDF of the building-model world).

Model, export and analyse flowchart

Model, export, analyse

Once you’ve made your building in Sketchup, export it in gbXML format and then import it into a wide variety of other tools for further analysis.

Of course, we provide our own cross-platform energy analysis tool, gEnergy, and we hope you’ll try it first. But you’re not limited to it. As gbXML is totally non-proprietary you can use it in any tool that supports it — see the comprehensive list on the gbxml.org website.

Why not start analysing today?

– Donald I