Getting started with Naviate Daylight

Things to consider before running Naviate Daylight:

1.Required Revit Elements and Window settings

 1.1. Rooms, spaces, or areas

• The function uses the floor area of all defined rooms, spaces, or areas in the model. Without rooms, spaces or areas the tool cannot define floor areas needed to calculate daylight area ratio, and the tool cannot get the room bounded surrounding walls, windows, and panels. 

1.2. Glass material in Windows, Doors, Curtain Walls...

• To get a daylight area of a room, surrounded windows and/or curtain walls need to have glass material. The Daylight tool looks for materials with a name containing “glass” or “glazing” or any other material name that you have set in the settings menu. The area of panels containing this material will be included in the daylight area.

1.3. Check if Environmental variables are set in Windows settings

• Some PCs are not allowing Naviate Daylight to set these variables due to security reasons. In that case, if the following error pops-up, IT support should check if these variables are set in Windows:

For 2019:
C:\Program Files\Symetri\Naviate\Revit 2019\Dll\AcceleradExe\lib
C:\Program Files\Symetri\Naviate\Revit 2019\Dll\RadianceExe\lib
For 2020:
C:\Program Files\Symetri\Naviate\Revit 2020\Dll\AcceleradExe\lib
C:\Program Files\Symetri\Naviate\Revit 2020\Dll\RadianceExe\lib

2.Required Revit Model set-up

 2.1. Naviate Daylight is not able to analyse complex geometries (i.e. Plumbing Fixtures, Speciality Equipment….)

• Current Naviate Daylight version is not managing complex geometries as expected, Plumbing elements are causing Daylight to fail, I believe it is due to the number of triangulations that are needed to convert the geometry of the plumbing fixtures in Radiance, it seems Radiance has a limit for those.

Suggestion: Remove elements with complex geometries (in most cases Plumbing Fixtures consist of complex shapes.

2.2. Toposurfaces won’t be taken into account when calculating Daylight values

• Current Naviate Daylight version does not support reading the toposurface geometry when analysing the Revit model

2.3. In a work-shared environment Naviate Daylight parameters won’t be saved to elements which belong to other users

• Naviate Daylight does not support sending Editing requests to other users when trying to edit their elements.

Suggestion: Create a local copy of the project when you want to run daylight simulations.

2.4. When saving parameters to elements in Groups, Naviate Daylight will ungroup them all and re-group them.

• During this proces the Revit ID of the model group will be changed, which will result in creation of one group per element in the initial group.

Suggestion: Ungroup all elements

2.4. Walls(Curtain Walls) and elements hosted on them that are slanted outwards will not be recognized by Daylight

• Due to Revits inability to bound the Room geometry to the slanted Walls Naviate Daylight will not recognize elements on slanted Walls and slanted Curtain Walls

2.5. Add room elements on balconies, consider naming the balcony rooms the same as specified in the Settings

- This enables the tool to recognize balcony/overhang areas and include them in the calculations as proposed by the calculation standard

2.4. Check if the correct Glass transparency is set on the Window and Curtain Wall elements.

- Naviate Daylight uses the Material properties and assets found in the Material Browser. For some standards it allows using the Family Type glass transparency parameter of the Window elements. Material assests need to be named as specified in the Naviate Daylight settings.

Things to consider after running Naviate Daylight:

 Saving Naviate Daylight shared parameters:

• The following parameters will be set in the Revit project when clicking save (or save and close).
  These values can be accessed by the element properties in Revit, and by the Revit schedules.

Rooms:

• Glass Area = The calculated net glass area of the room. [read-only]
• Required Window-to-Floor Ratio = The demanded ratio between the floor area and glazing area in the building envelope of a room. [editable]
• Window-to-Floor Ratio = The ratio between the floor area and glazing area in the building envelope of a room. Daylight Area Rate [%] = Glazing Area / Floor Area * 100% [readonly]

Windows /Curtain Walls/Doors [all read-only]:

• Gross Glass Area = The area of all glazing panels in the window element.
• Panels = The number of glazing panels found in the window element.
• Glazing Bead Area = The glazing bead area underneath the mullion or the window frame.
• Shading Reduction Glass Area = The area of the glazing reduced by shading
• Area Lower Glazing = The glass area below a defined height above floor.
• Spandrel Panel Area = The opaque glass area in front of spandrel panels.
• Net Glass Area = The glass area excluding spandrel panels, frames and mullions, shading, transparency ratios etc.
• Shading Factor = The area of the glazing reduced by shading 
• Transparency Factor = The average transparency factor of the glass panels.
• Transparency Reduction Glass Area = The glass area to be reduced as a result of the transparency factor of the glass panels.

References:

For more detailed information please visit our help pages. Detailed information about how Naviate Daylight works are provided to you.

Daylight Ratio:
https://help.symetri.com/display/HELPNAVANA/Daylight+Ratio   
Daylight Factor: 
https://help.symetri.com/display/HELPNAVANA/Daylight+Factor

FAQ:
https://help.symetri.com/display/HELPNAVANA/Frequently+Asked+Questions+about+Daylight+Factor