[00:00:00] In the last video, we walked through the OpenStudio menus and toolbars and covered a the SketchUp and we had a quick look around the OpenStudio application. In this video, we will continue by creating the geometry for our energy model. Let’s continue with the SketchUp file that we saved at the end of the last video. This SketchUp file has a few layers define where we’ve imported out floorplans and it’s based on the imperial units template.
[00:00:43] We are now ready to create an OpenStudio model. From the File Management toolbar, select New OpenStudio model for wizard. This’ll pop open a prompt: “Do you want to save your current OpenStudio model?” I’m going to say no. The user input now gives us the option of selecting from a few different dropdown menus. I want to create an office building and the templates we will use will be the 90.1-2010. We’re going to base this in Denver, which I believe is climate zone 5B. Now we want to instruct the wizard to create space types, create a construction set, and set the building defaults using the objects. So these three options will be true. This’ll go away and bring in some information from a library that we can then use in our energy model. So it’s brought in 13 space types and one construction set.
[00:01:43] It then offers you the option bit of information here to run this space type and construction set wizard. If you were to do that, that would bring in additional information. It would bring in a whole bunch of 189 schedules. I find that we won’t use those in this course and it’s better to keep the energy model as light as possible. It makes it easier, I find, when you don’t have information that you don’t need. So I’m going to say okay to that and I’m not going to run that wizard. At this point, I recommend that we create a bit of a checkpoint so let’s save our OpenStudio model. I’m going to save this is my Tutorials 2 folder. I’m going to overwrite what’s there already and I’m going to call that Video 2. I’m also going to now separately save the SketchUp file, so I’m going to go under the SketchUp File menu, Save As and I’m going to put that in the Video 2 folder. I’m going to call that Video 2. I won’t replace that because it’s already there.
[00:02:51] Now what I want to point out at this point is that you have two different file types you’re working with. There is a SketchUp or a .skp. There’s also the OpenStudio or .osm. Now those are two very different file types. The .osm contains everything you need for your energy model. You can open that .osm in two places. You can open it in Sketchup. You can also open it in OpenStudio’s standalone application. If you have a .osm file that you want to open in SketchUp – for example, you want to open it up and look at the geometry or maybe you want to edit that geometry. The way to do that is to go to the Extensions menu, OpenStudio, File and you want to open that from this menu option here. If you were to try to open the SketchUp file, the Video2.skp, you’ll find that there is a broken link between the SketchUp file and the OpenStudio file. Now you can read up more about that if you get confused on [INAUDIBLE 00:04:06] but for now, the simple advice to take is that if you have a .osm file save and you want to open it in SketchUp, then you need to follow this Extensions, OpenStudio, File, Open OpenStudio Model. That’s the way to open it. So that’s a little bit off track but it gives you a sense of the two different file types you’re working with and how to keep control of them and how to open them.
[00:04:24] So I’ve not made a bit of a saving checkpoint and we’re going to move on to creating our floorplan diagrams. We’ll do this by tracing the floorplans using SketchUp’s rectangle shapes and line tool. Let’s go ahead and hide the level two plans. Now we can see the level one plans. We’ll move into the top-down view. Just make sure you’ve got the parallel projection on. Grab the rectangular shape tool. I like to start at the top left of the plan. First step is just to create a shape or a rectangle that covers the floorplan in its entirety. Switch here into x-ray mode so we can see through the shapes to the floorplan underneath it. Now what I’ll do is just work my way clockwise around the building using the rectangle tool to trace out these rooms and that’ll leave us with a two-dimensional floorplan diagram.
[00:05:42] For this room here, I’m going to go past the sort of intended shape of the space and then come back with another rectangle to trim off this section here, and once I’m finished I’ll come back and delete these unnecessary lines. The reception space has a triangular type shape to it so I’m going to leave that space and come back to it with the line tool. I’ll skip that and draw the vestibule here. I’m just going to go past that shape with a rectangle that covers over the corner and I’ll come back and tidy up that line. Moving along to the vestibule at the top of the building here. Now I’m going to come back and deal with these zones in the middle of the space. So you can see that the cafeteria and the restroom are disconnected from the outside walls so what we’ll do is connect the cafeteria to the meeting room. Let me show you what I mean. I’ll draw a zone that crosses that corridor space and then come back and trim off this corridor. And what that does is connects the cafeteria to the corridor to the meeting room, and that helps OpenStudio to understand that the cafeteria is an internal zone and it’ll apply the correct boundary conditions when we run the surface matching tools in a few steps.
[00:07:34] So I think I’ve now covered all of those sort of rectangular spaces. I’m just going to come back and diagram out the reception and the admin office. Switch back into plan view and grab the lines tool. Now I’m just going to trace out these shapes. So I want to continue that line. I’m going to go over the edge of it there. Again, go past the edge here. I want to continue from this wall across. Now just by eyeball, I judge where that line starts and intersect it across the edge of the floorplan. Again by eyeball, I judge this point and where it crosses that line. And I want the intersection of these two lines to go across the red axis to this point here. So I’d use the SketchUp Inference Engine just to help me position that line and then I can come down to this end point here.
[00:08:42] So now I’ve got the floorplan diagram, all the lines we need, and we’ve also got quite a few lines we don’t need so I’m going to grab the eraser tool. You can also use the shortcut, E key on your keyboard. I’m just going to delete some of these unnecessary lines here. So let’s have a look at what we’ve done and make sure that all of the lines intersect properly and that we’re left with a collection of two-dimensional shapes. So just clicking on each of these shows the surface area inside the selection and we can see that we’ve got sort of a collection of two-dimensional shapes. There a line up here I forgot to delete so I’ll just get rid of this one. And what you’ll also notice that all the lines are the same sort of weight; there’s no lines that are slightly thicker or thinner than the others. That can be a sign that something hasn’t gone quite right.
[00:09:51] So that floorplan diagram is now complete. We can turn off the layer of the plans below just to have another look at it. And what I’ll do at this point is create a copy of this diagram and we’re going to make use of the copy when we get to level two. So I’m going to select all of that and hold down Control and click on the move tool, and that puts it into a copy sort of function. And then I’m going to select on the end point here and move –sorry, that didn’t click on copy mode. Hold down Control, click on the move tool and that should duplicate. There we go. And I want to move that up the blue axis by 12 feet.
[00:10:39] So now we’ve got the level one plan and we’ve made a copy of the level one plan that we’ll sort of use a jump-start when we get to level two. It’s not quite right for level two, but it’s a good start. So we don’t want the level two diagram to get in our way so I’m going to select that and, using the entity info, I’m going to change that to sit on plan’s level two layer, which is hidden. So that’s now out of my way. So those floorplan diagrams are now ready to be converted into spaces. Before I do that, I’m going to save a copy of my OpenStudio model. So I’m going to replace that and this just helps me create a sort of a check point so that if anything does go wrong, I can come back to this point without too much additional work.
[00:11:38] To convert our floorplan diagram into spaces, select that diagram. Make sure you’ve selected all of the edges and surfaces on that, and then we use the Create Spaces from Diagram button. This’ll ask for a floor height. Let’s use 12 feet. And we just want to create one floor from this diagram. That will run an algorithm that converts that two-dimensional outline of your rooms and spaces into a collection of three-dimensional shapes. It’ll also initialize the OpenStudio spaces definitions. So just to explain and show you what that means, I’m going to open the Inspector. The OpenStudio Inspector lets us work interactively with the underlying OpenStudio model data and definitions. Here we can see the spaces in the model, and there are 15 of those. And each of those spaces has been initialized in the model and it’s been given an automatically generated name, so 101, 102. Those names are not particular helpful and in a few steps’ time, we’re going to rename all those spaces.
[00:12:56] Our next step here is to edit the floorplan diagram to suit the level two layout. To make this a little bit easier, I’m just going to hide some of the geometry so that we don’t get confused while we’re looking. Select everything on level one and right click and press Hide. You can also turn off the level one plan. Now we can see just the level two floorplan as a background, and we can see the copy we made of the level one diagram in the right place. Switching to x-ray mode and now we just need to grab the eraser tool and delete some of these lines so that we have the right floorplan diagram. Get rid of the vestibule spaces. There’s not going to be any doors on level two. So there’s just a couple of edits to make there.
[00:13:55] Now that floorplan diagram is ready. I’m going to turn off the plans on level two and that reminds me that we’ve actually got that floorplan geometry on the wrong layer. So what I’m going to do here is just go edge-on, select everything on that sort of heightened level, and now I’m going to move that back onto layer zero. And you’ll notice that it can’t move the locked geometry which is fair enough. So SketchUp hasn’t moved that. So when I turn plans for level two off, the plans disappear and here is my floorplan diagram. So I can now select that entire diagram and create spaces from diagram tool. Again, we’ll have a 12-foot space, 12-foot high, and we’re just going to grab one floor. Running that creates the spaces on level two for us. Turn off the x-ray mode and let’s unhide what we hid before. So we go back to Edit and Unhide All. And there we have all of the spaces for level one and level two complete.
[00:15:16] Our next step is to rename those spaces. As I mentioned previously, the OpenStudio Inspector allows us to peer just sort of underneath the hood here and look into the OpenStudio model, and in doing that, we can see that the space names sort of being automatically generated are not particularly sort of informative. So space 101, for example, represents the admin office area here on level one. And what we’ll need to do is go around the building and rename all of these spaces. We can do this by working interactively with the OpenStudio Inspector. With the OpenStudio Inspector window open, click onto Spaces and you can see the list of spaces in this list on the bottom left here. Here on the Edit Object window, we can see the space name and we can change that so we know, for example, that this is admin office area. Now to do this job, what we’ll have to do is be able to see through our building to the floorplans underneath. We’ll have to read off the name of the space from the floorplans, and then, selecting the correct space, put the space name here in the Objects Name field.
[00:16:33] So just to demonstrate a couple, what I’ll do is show you the method here. You’ll find it useful to hide everything on left two, so I’m just going to do a left drag, select there, right click, select Hide. Let’s put the level one plans back on and put the building into x-ray view. Now if we look plan-down, we can see through the building and identify the name of the space underneath each space. So selecting onto this area here, we’ve got Reception Area 102 selected and you can see that because it’s been highlight in blue there, and we can rename here to Reception 102. That’s the basic method. In the interest of keeping the video kind of quick and clear, I’m going to continue this task and I’m going to then edit the video and come back to show you the building with all of these spaces renamed.
[00:17:41] So I’ve not finished renaming the spaces on both level one and level two. I’m going to unhide everything so that I can see the entire building again, turn off the x-ray mode, and I’m going to turn off the plans. So here we can see our completed spaces, and each of the spaces has a name that is now going to help us identify how that space is used and make sure that we’re assigning the correct internal loads and schedules to each space.
[18:16:04] Now that we have a complete set of spaces, we need to inspect the surface boundary conditions and ensure that these boundary conditions have been correctly applied. We won’t need the OpenStudio Inspector so I’m going to hide this to make a bit more space on the screen. And to demonstrate what changes the functions we’re about to run will have, let’s have a look at the Render by Boundary Condition. So here we see the model colored in a blue. Now this blue indicates an external boundary condition. If we grab a section and peer inside the building, we can see inside our model, we have a sort of a tan color for the floors and we also see that the internal walls are colored blue as well. So at the moment, the surfaces do not have the right boundary conditions applied. We want to see our internal walls colored green, and that green surface would indicate an internal boundary condition.
[00:19:21] So we need to run a couple of functions. We’re going to intersect all of our interzone surfaces first. We’ll do that. We’ll interest an entire model, press OK. That just goes around and intersects any surfaces in the model. That takes a moment to run and once that’s complete, we can run the surface matching. We’ll match in the entire model and that’s going to go around and make sure that any shared surfaces between spaces are correctly identified and it’s also going to change and boundary conditions that have not yet been set. So we’ l now close that dialogue box and again, let’s have a look inside our model. And here we can see the effect or running those tools is that the internal walls have now been colored green, the floors are also colored green, and we can see the ground contact to the floor is now the correct color at the tan. Let’s just delete that section. I don’t need it. We’ll select this one. Use the move tool to grab that and just move through the building having a look at each of those surfaces. So just a quick visual inspection shows that all of those are as they are expected to be. You can turn off that section. So now we’ve correctly assigned all of the surfaces of the spaces.
[00:20:46] We are now ready to create thermal zones. At the present point in the model, we have spaces assigned, but these aren’t yet assigned to any thermal zone. What we can make use of is the OpenStudio user script to add new thermal zone for spaces with no thermal zone. Now running that will go around the model and create on new thermal zone for each space. Now in my mind, that’s the cleanest connection between what OpenStudio calls spaces and what EnergyPlus expects, which are thermal zone. So what we’ll have now is a thermal zone for each and every space and that will ensure that the zones that EnergyPlus expects have been crated in the model. To see what we’ve done there, let’s open the Inspector and in the list of objects in our model, we can see thermal zones have now been created. And the spaces indicate a thermal zone, so if you look through a particular space, you can see its corresponding thermal zone.
[00:22:01] Now these thermal zones at the moment have that very generic sort of name applied to them. Rather than that, what we would prefer is the thermal zone names and the space names to match each other. There’s a script for that as well: Rename Thermal Zones Based on Space Names. If we now look at our thermal zone list, we can now identify the thermal zones based on the spaces. Let’s save a checkpoint here.
[00:22:38] So our thermal zones are now complete and we’re ready to move onto adding windows. To add the windows to our model, we are going to need to work our way progressively around each elevation and we’re going to need to read the plans and identify that type of window and its dimensions for each wall and we’re going to draw those directly onto the walls of the building. So what I’ll do again is start at the top left and work my way clockwise around the model. I’m going to do level one first. I’m going to copy the windows up to level two where I can to minimize the amount of work required. And I’ve got to use the legend here on the plans to draw the windows of the correct dimensions onto the walls of the building.
[00:23:34] So drawing windows is a relatively straightforward task in SketchUp. We’ll grab the shape tool and use the shape tool in a rectangular mode and just here where you see the indication on the floorplans of where those windows sit on the walls, we’re just going to roughly draw the window in that position and work our way around the building. What I do need at this point is a bit of a guideline. I want my windows to sit two feet from the ground level, so I grab the line tool, start here at the end point on the ground level, and I want that to be two feet up. I’m just going to draw a bit of a guide following the red axis here and that’s going to be an indication of how high the windows should be up off the floor. And I’ll grab the rectangle tool and begin tracing a shape. Now that shape is just going to be a simple rectangle at the moment and we’re going to then duplicate those around the elevation.
[00:24:36] So first of all, I’m going to draw all of my 7-foot by 5-foot windows. Now what I’ll do is I’ll select that rectangle I’ve just drawn and use the copy tool and I’m just going to duplicate these windows, moving them down the red axis. Now at the moment, these rectangles aren’t windows and you can kind of tell that because they have that sort of default gray color and they’re also not transparent. So what we’ll do once we’ve finished drawing all of our windows is use the project loose geometry tool. And first I’m just going to go around the building and complete all of these windows and doors. When I move onto a new elevation, I’ll just draw a quick guide line just to get the height right and then rather than trying to duplicate this rectangle, I’ll start drawing a new rectangle on thus surface. And I find that’s a little bit easier than trying to duplicate that rectangle and then rotating it in different axes. So I draw that guide line and grab the rectangle tool and let’s draw another 5x7 window. Now you can tidy up at this point if you want or come back later and delete these guide lines, whichever works for you.
[00:26:16] I’ll select that window and now use the copy tool and let’s duplicate these windows into the positions indicated on the plans. That green guide line helps me to make sure I’m at the right height above the ground. Here on the south elevation, I’m going to skip this custom sized window and draw this 7-foot by 5-foot window on the south elevation here. I need a guide line. Whoops. Let’s try that one again. Now as an alternative to drawing those guide lines, let me show you another way of doing the same thing. Let’s delete this window, grab the rectangle tool, and I’m just going to draw this window from the bottom surface here. So let’s make this window 7-foot by 5-foot. Then I’ll select this. Rather than duplicating it, first I’ll select it, then I’ll use the move tool, grab the end point and we can move that up the blue axis by two feet. So that’s another way of doing the same thing and it means you don’t have to create the guide line.
[00:27:58] Now that’s a 10-foot window, that’s a door, that’s a 10-foot window. These are custom sized windows here on this admin office elevation. And if we come round to the west elevation, I’ve got two more windows to add. I’m going to delete this guide line. So that completes all of the 7-foot by 5-foot windows on level one. I’m not going to move around the building and draw the next window, which the legend indicates is these 10-foot by 5-foot windows. So working my way clockwise around the building, the first one I need to draw is here on the south side. So I can actually use the shortcut key. So if you type R on your keyboard, and then let’s do this one off the floor edge here. So we’ll make this 10-foot by 5-foot. Select this and we’re going to need to move it back to the sort of middle here. And then let’s move it up the blue axis by two feet. Now that we’ve drawn one, we can duplicate this window into position here on the south.
[00:29:47] That’s all the 10-foot by 5-foot windows and the next down the legend is the other so we can move around the building now. Oh, I told a lie. I’m sorry. There’s two more 10-foot by 5-foot windows in this western elevation so let’s draw those while we’re here. This time I’ll use the guide line from this position. We’ll duplicate this window. Our next step is to draw the custom windows. Again, clockwise around the building, the first custom sized window we get to is here. I believe it’s the conference room. So let’s draw that one. This window needs to be 40-foot by 5-foot. There’s a door in here. We’ll come back to that one. And on the admin office sort of southwest elevation here we’ve got three windows to draw. These are 17-foot by 5-foot.
[00:31:41] And now we are ready to draw the doors. We’ve got two door types. There’s a 5-foot by 9-foot and the slightly larger front door on the south which is 6.25x8. So let’s move to our west elevation and draw. This needs to be 5x9. Let’s just make that a bit more aesthetically centered. And our main door: 8-foot and 6.25 wide. I think the dimensions might’ve been transposed here. I’ll just draw this again. And we’ll move this into place here in the center. So that completes all of the doors and windows on level one. I’ll just create a bit of a save checkpoint at this point.
[00:33:33] Now just one thing I wanted to highlight here which is a window surface will sit entirely inside a wall surface. A door can share one of its surfaces with the wall. What you don’t want to do is draw a subsurface, such as a door or window, with two of its edges on two edges of the wall. If you do that, EnergyPlus will get confused and your simulation could fail. So you just need to bear in mind that if you’re drawing a window that, say, takes up practically all of the wall, you need to make sure that the window is not adjacent to the edge of the wall. You need to leave a little fraction of space in between the two. Otherwise, well the OpenStudio algorithm won’t correctly understand that you intended that surface to be a window.
[00:34:24] What I’ll do next is make use of the copy tool to duplicate all of the level one windows up to level two where it’s appropriate to do so. So I know from reading the plans that all of these 7-foot windows are in the same position on level two, so let’s select all of them. Now I’m not going to select those doors. I’ll select that window and this window as well.
Energy-Models.com is a site for energy modelers, building simulators, architects, and engineers who want learn the basics, to advanced concepts of energy modeling. We've got online training courses and tutorials for eQUEST, Trane TRACE 700, OpenStudio, and LEED for energy modeling. All our energy modeling courses are video based. What better way to learn energy modeling software than screen-casts of exactly how things are done?
Copyright © 2010-2024 CosmoLogic LLC. TRACE 700 and eQUEST are ™ of Trane Inc. and James J. Hirsch respectively. Energy-Models.com is built in San Francisco, CA and Slinger, WI USA.