Building
Definition
In Virtualwind, geometric models of Buildings, consisting of Building Parts, have to meet certain constraints. Essentially, each Building Part is represented by a triangular mesh and the mesh has to form a solid, meaning that it is:
- Closed: it bounds a finite volume in 3D space;
- Clean: each edge of the mesh is shared by exactly two faces (i.e., there are no dangling edges or faces, there are no faces immersed inside the bounded volume, etc.)
If you use Google SketchUp as the modeling tool to create the geometric models, you need to ensure that those faces which belong to the same Building Part are grouped as a Group or Component. Consult the Virtualwind Modeling Guidelines page in the help document of Virtualwind SketchUp Plugin or the Google SketchUp Tools manual for details on how to prepare Buildings/solids for Virtualwind.
Creation and Deletion
Buildings cannot be created or deleted within Virtualwind. They can only be imported. But you can choose to ignore a building or a building part (same effect as deleting it from the simulation) by checking off its Model Status as explained below.
Settings
In the Entities & Monitors tree, Building entities are group under the Building Manager and each Building has one or multiple Parts. This forms a three-level hierarchy of Building Manager → Building → Building Parts (see the figure below). At each level, there is both a Model item and an Actor item associated with each instance. Since the geometric models of the Buildings are usually imported from a modeling software, such as Google SketchUp, there is not much you can do to manipulate these models aside from choosing the particular instance to be present or ignored in the simulation. To do this, check on or off, respectively, the Model Status check box of its model item. Once checked off, certain Actor settings are then applied so that you can easily tell it in the Viewport. By default, it is set to on for every building.
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The Actor items, however, provide a variety of means for you to control the appearance of these instances. The following figure shows a typical Actor item from which you can do the following:
- show or hide the particular instance in the viewport by checking on or off the View Status check box;
- show or hide the shading representation of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Shade check box;
- change the color of the instance by clicking on the Color box;
- show or hide the color of the instance stored from SketchUp by checking on or off the SKP_color check box;
- show or hide the wireframe representation of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Wireframe check box;
- show or hide the texture of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Texture check box;
- change the transparency of the instance by changing the number of X-Ray Intensity in the range of [0, 1]*.
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