I am working on a Sefaira model in Sketchup. My issue is with the third floor of my building; the floors appear in Sketchup, the square footage in the Sefaira plugin in Sketchup is correct and the daylighting visualization is showing my floors correctly but as soon as I upload the geometry to Sefaira web tool most of my third floor disappears. I’ve tried redrawing geometry but nothing seems to be working. Has anyone else encountered this? Anyone have an idea of how to fix this?
I agree with Dave’s recommendations in that the axis needs to be right side up. But another thing to also keep in mind is that your floor surface is tagged as “ignored”, you will want to tag it as a “floor” so that Sefaira picks it up properly for the analysis.
The entity palette gives you the ability of every now and then checking to see how Sefaira is reading the surfaces in your model and correct them if needed.
I would also highly recommend that you take a look at the Sefaira playlist here, if you haven’t already done so. There are certain things that you can do in this model that will enhance your experience with Sefaira as you move forward and the playlist will help you get there.
Thank you for the reply but in my Sefaira those surfaces are not set to ignore they are set as floors, there are no surfaces identified as ignore but then they still are not appearing in the web app. Is there an issue with my Sefaira plugin?
Second, in the web app, after you upload the model to the project >> click on the blue “share project” button and share the project with niraj@sketchup.com
That way I can check what might be going on, on my end as well.
Actually, scratch my earlier comment. Upon uploading the project to the web app, I see the SF drop as well. Let me investigate further and will reach back out as soon as I find out more.
I actually went ahead and redrew a clean SketchUp Model_2.skp (398.7 KB) model (granted you will still have to draw in the rest of the windows and shading planes), the model when uploaded to the web interface reads the floors correctly. Once you download the model though, please ensure that the orientation is correct. The green axis points North as far as Sefaira is concerned.
I had our development team check the model and they are not quite sure what is happening with the model either. Was it imported into SketchUp from some other program? The axis being upside down suggests that it might have?
Thank you, I appreciate all your help. Yes this was a Rhino model that I converted to a dwg and then imported to Sketchup so maybe that is where the issue came from.
Something with regards to the Rhino DWG import seemed to have caused the discrepancy in the earlier query. As for why you are seeing two different square footages, could you share your model here along with a screengrab of what you see on the web application, including the what you have set in the “zoning” tab in the web app?
That way I can drill down a little further and see what might be going on.
I wonder if someone can help me troubleshoot why my floors (which I’ve tagged using the Sefaira plug-in in Sketchup) are not uploading to the Sefaira web application in their entirety? They’re showing in the daylighting visualization in the plug-in, but are not reflected in the zoning tab on the web application in their entirety. Some of the rooms are missing…
I’ve used the previous comments to check the following are present / correct:
Building modelled near origin
Axis facing the correct way
Hidden geometry deleted / reduced
Shading planes reduced
Complex geometry has been stripped back / simplified
Entities tagged correctly (I hope! - toggled on and off to double check)
Building is untagged
Geometry is appropriately grouped
When I’m on the ‘Zoning’ tab in the web application and select (One Zone / Room) it identifies some rooms but not others. The floor shape should look like a complete boomerang without the gaps on both floor levels (as seen screenshotted in green).
The only thing I can think of, is that due to the complex / curved nature of the design, there are some holes / gaps in the building envelope where I have crudely simplified the model in preparation for assessment. Could this be complicating things / leading to floors being miscounted for some reason, or is there something else I’m missing?
I’ve also tried deleting the hidden layers which include internal walls with the belief that this hidden geometry was slowing down simulation times / making a difference, which didn’t end up helping.
The GIA in plug-in is 841m2 and in the web application is only 412m2…
The model that you are running through Sefaira, especially for energy analysis, is too detailed. A question that I always recommend asking when you are trying to run energy analysis on a project is, “If I were to send this model to an Energy Modeling Specialist, what would they do?” and the answer is that they will invariably have to simply the model to include less curves, representative air volumes by flattening the roof etc).
Also, if you were to change to one of the default styles in SketchUp, there is still a lot of redundant geometry floating around, which increases the 3D Space that Sefaira needs to “look into” to create that energy model in the back end.
I would also remove any of the curved interior walls (if you are only running energy analysis) so that it does not carve out an outline on the floor. After all, if Sefaira sees an outline on your floor surface it will recognize it as a zone boundary and therefore we will want to avoid any redundant outlines in our model.
After making just a few edits/clean up in the model you can see Sefaira recognizing more of the 2nd floor area.
That being said, my recommendation would be to simply recreate this geometry with less curved elements while still maintaining a representative air volume in those zones.
