Below you can find the most frequently asked questions about the Daylight Application. For frequently asked questions about the generic use of Xinaps plug-ins for Revit see the other page >>
The application shows you with a message "no rooms found in your Revit project"
Did you define rooms, spaces and/or areas on all floors of the building you wish to calculate?
The application shows you a limited set of rooms, where you expect more rooms.
Did you define all rooms, spaces and/or areas on all floors of the building you wish to calculate?
If you select one or more rooms before opening the Daylight application, the application will only calculate the selected rooms. Deselect objects in Revit and try again.
The daylight application is not finding windows.
Is your Window list empty, or is the gros glazing area and net daylight area zero? Then the windows are not found.
The glazing within a window will be found by setting the right glazing material names in the daylight settings. Dit you set the right material names in the Daylight Settings?
The glazing might have an offset from the room/space/area boundary, because of wall thickness or bay window, please try to set the "maximum glass distance to room/area boundary" to a larger value in the Daylight settings.
If you're using area plans, please check if the area boundaries are aligned with the windows you wish to calculate.
Read more on Daylight Ratio Evaluator Settings>>
The Daylight Factor is not being calculated. Why?
The Daylight Factor feature needs to be activated with a separate license. Ask Symetri for this separate license. Do you have this license activated and you still do not get any Daylight Factor results? Please check Daylight Settings whether you have a tab called "Daylight Factor". If no, then your Daylight Factor license is not activated. If yes, the please check the box "calculate daylight factor" and run the calculation again.
Read more on this issue>>
Calculating with Accelerad fails. How can I fix this?
Accelerad is a GPU based Radiance like rendering engine to calculate Daylight Factor and Lux. A daylight calculation with Accelerad can be up to twenty times faster compared to a Radiance CPU based calculation. As Accelerad only runs with NVIDIA CUDA graphic cards, it requires you to check the following two things:
- Check if you have compatible NVIDIA Graphics Card. Basically any Nvidia graphic card works. Though the CUDA compute abalability factor defines your calculation speed.
How to Check What Graphics Card (GPU) Is in Your PC.
Check the CUDA performance for your graphic card here. - Install the latest NVIDIA driver. Driver version 435.80 or newer is required.
How do I determine which NVIDIA display driver version is currently installed on my PC?
You can download the latest driver here. - Install the NVIDIA OptiX SDK.
You can download the latest SDK from the NVIDIA website (NVIDIA account required), or download the compatible installer from Xinaps.
After having installed the latest NVIDIA graphics driver and NVIDIA OptiX SDK, you can restart the Daylight calculation.
Opening and calculating daylight on my project takes a really long time. Why? What can I do to make the waiting time shorter?
Opening daylight on a big project might take a while, because running instant calculations like the shading factors, the balcony area, and the window to room adjacency. Calculation time depends on the number of rooms and windows, the complexity of the room shapes, and the local standard. where the Norwegian standard is the fastest, the Danish standard is the slowest. It takes about 0.4 seconds to run Swedish standard, which results 2:00 min. for 300 rooms.
You can easily reduce calculation time a lot bij selecting the rooms you would like to calculate, before opening the daylight application. Daylight wil then only be run on the selected rooms. Please note that some windows on the boundary of the room selection will be considered as external windows because the opposite room is not included in the selection.
Saving parameters takes a really long time. Why? What can I do to make the waiting time shorter?
Saving all daylight results to rooms and windows might take a while, because every value need to be set to the project at a time. Parameters within a group cannot be modified, therefore we need to ungroup, change parameter, regroup. This is a lineair proces, where ungroup-regroup action might fail because of other group relations. You can easily reduce saving time by making sure rooms and windows are not placed within groups.
A better approach is, like the above, to select the rooms you would like to calculate. This greatly reduces the number of parameter values the application needs to save.
When saving parameters I always get an error like question. What does this error mean?
The question "Xinaps tries to change a parameter within a group" might be always shown on your Revit project. This message is shown because the daylight application tries to write parameters with the calculated values in rooms and windows. If a room or window is within a model group, the application cannot write the parameter. Instead the application will ungroup the elements, write the parameters, and regroup it again. During this proces the Revit ID of the model group will be changed, so the question is whether this change is accepted.