Butterfly/GH not displaying every time interval

[cjbotham]

Hello Butterfly Users,

I'm trying to simulate outdoor airflow on tower forms, and I'm having issues visualizing each timestep in Rhino; I've set up a definition to save out a screenshot each time the 'solution' component changes the 'timestep' output, but many of my saved screenshots show a blank screen. Picture of the output folder:

^ the numbers of the filenames correspond to the 'timestep' output of the 'solution' component. I'm trying to create a video of the screenshots, but with all of the blank screens it won't look very good.

I've played around with different values for the 'interval' input on the 'solution' component, but changing this doesn't seem to make any difference.

As far as I can tell, I'm getting the blank screens because the 'loadProbesValue' component fails to receive data from the 'solution' component, so GH has no info to display:

My question is: how do I get GH to display each timestep correctly so I don't get these blank screens? Is there another way to visualize an animation of all the timesteps together, or is there something I'm missing with the 'solution' component that can fix this?

Thanks, and keep up the great work; Butterfly is a great tool!

cheers,

cb

[TheodoreGalanos]

Hello @cjbotham,

I guess it depends to what exactly you want to do here. These simulations are steady state, so at each iteration, the same moment in time is recalculated, and hopefully the solution improves with each one. In that sense, having these images helps you see how the model converges to a solution but won't let you see a transition in actual time.

That said, I think it's better if you use OF itself, or even paraview, to do this. I am attaching a function object file you can use for that. To make it work you will have to create a mesh surface (with enough faces to give an accurate sampling) and save it to an stl file using Rhino. You then put that file inside your case folder, and put the surfaces function object file attached inside your case/system folder.

OF will then sample your surface for you at each iteration (notice the writeInterval option in the surfaces file being set to 1 for that) and save it to a vtk file. You can then visualize thes in different ways, either paraview or even with the vtk python library.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards, Theodore.

surfaces.zip

[cjbotham]

Hi Theodore,

Thanks so much for the reply; I'll play around with this and see if I can get it working.

cheers!

cb

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 7:54 PM TheodoreGalanos [email protected] wrote:

Hello @cjbotham https://github.com/cjbotham,

I guess it depends to what exactly you want to do here. These simulations are steady state, so at each iteration, the same moment in time is recalculated, and hopefully the solution improves with each one. In that sense, having these images helps you see how the model converges to a solution but won't let you see a transition in actual time.

That said, I think it's better if you use OF itself, or even paraview, to do this. I am attaching a function object file you can use for that. To make it work you will have to create a mesh surface (with enough faces to give an accurate sampling) and save it to an stl file using Rhino. You then put that file inside your case folder, and put the surfaces function object file attached inside your case/system folder.

OF will then sample your surface for you at each iteration (notice the writeInterval option in the surfaces file being set to 1 for that) and save it to a vtk file. You can then visualize thes in different ways, either paraview or even with the vtk python library.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards, Theodore.

surfaces.zip https://github.com/ladybug-tools/butterfly/files/3214497/surfaces.zip

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