Nice design and very high quality work. Great texturing and rendering. Beautiful!

Thanks for the reply. I imagine I'll probably end up getting both, but I'll likely take your advice and start with AO.

@renderiza said:

I personally don't own a MAC so I can't test it myself and will be very grateful if someone can let me know if it works.

Four years and a bit later, yes it works on a Mac... but for some reason the web dialog load time is insanely long. At first I thought it wasn't working at all, as the dialog remained blank. I did some other stuff and came back to SU and it was populated. From that point on everything seemed to work fine.

I just did a test and it took almost 3 minutes for the dialog to load, so something's not right.

The plugin itself is great and a major time saver otherwise.

@chippwalters said:

Currently, I'm working with my new SketchFX Ex extension to figure out a custom render theme and video workflow for these in progress pictures. Here are a few tests..

I've looked at this extension and considered adding it to my list of plugins-to-buy. (along with Ambient Occlusion). I really like some of the effects and your examples look great.

How have you found it? Are you happy with the output? Is there any performance hit? Does using it without AO severly handicap the avaialble effects? (I use Twilight Render currently)

Oh, and the project overall is very impressive... but having seen some of your previous work (e.g. your Hyperloop presentation) I'm not at all surprised. Great work.

I'll get to answering your questions later today, when I have some open time. In the meantime here are screenshots of the foundation / detail drawings (sans cartouche).

Let me get back to you with a typical profile.

As for naming, Passivhaus / Passive House isn't our trademark, but rather that of the Passive House Institute (Passivhaus Institut in Germany, where it originated): http://www.passivehouse.com/index.html

I'll see if we can come up with a more generic but still descriptive name. We have simply used 'EPS Tray Foundation' as our descriptive term, so maybe that would work... if we can't find anything better.

How difficult was it to set up? Is the throughput of TB2 enough for 4k/5K?

I should note that specific assemblies and methods — whether foundation / wall / roof etc — are not spec'd by the PH standard, rather their performance is. How you get there is up to you.

So the 8" monolithic slab isn't hard and fast, though it's what we've settled on for combined strength and simplicity: any increase in concrete costs is made up for by simpler tray forming and prep. It could also be done with a 10" grade beam and 6" slab. Seems to me that since you've already enabled grade beams in your regular foundations, then you could use that shape for the upper face(s) of the underslab insulation. (another example where the boolean solid tools would simplify things).

As to the other measurement variables:

1. EPS thickness (obviously) with underslab and edge thickness as independent variables.
2. The width of the upper portion of the EPS footing profile is dependant on the combined outboard cavity wall / sheathing so that the rainscreen / envelope terminate flush with the EPS (as shown in the section drawing I sent you), .
3. The height of the upper portion is simply the slab depth.
4. The front edge profile (chamfer) is just to provide a good integrated drainage plane and connection to the frost protection, so not critical. For first go-round it could be square to simplify things.
5. Frost protection is uniform 4' around the perimeter @ 4" thick, so maybe width and thickness of FP EPS should be independent variables as well?

I'll check with the principal of our firm to see if he's OK with me posting an anonymized version of the EPS tray drawings I PM'd you, so that others can follow/engage the discussion.

In our climate, we use full underslab insulation (anywhere from 6-14") to thermally isolate the slab. In PassivHaus builds we float the house on a 12 - 14" EPS tray that totally eliminates thermal bridging through the envelope and conduction loss to the ground.

Inside perimeter insulation — 2 to 4' of EPS/XPS extending inward from the footing leaving the center area uninsulated — may be sufficient in milder climate zones, and was/(still is?) common for use under basement slabs. But here, the conduction heat loss through the slab renders any material savings moot after the first winter or two of heating bills.

I'll PM you a foundation drawing set for a recent build to give you an idea of our approach — not as an input for feature requests, as I realize that our approach would be considered way overboard by people unfamiliar with PH standards — but just for your interest.

And if you haven't had a chance, I recommend highly that you check out the Iso-Slab website linked in an earlier post. It derives from European slab insulation systems that have been available for years there, originally developed to meet the needs of a burgeoning PH market. It will give you an idea of where building is going, even if the NA construction industry is notoriously slow and resistant to adopting new methods / better materials / higher performance standards.

I'm in the same boat as you and have been looking at a Razor Blade Stealth / Core setup as an option to continuing with Mac.

The enabling of external graphics with Metal2 is a welcome development which may allow me to stay with Apple. With regards AMD GPU: the recent announcement of Nvidia Pascal GeForce GPU drivers for MacOS hopefully means that they might become an option when the Apple external graphcs solution becomes publicly available (reported as Spring 2018).

Apple's AR Development Kit (https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/5/15743274/apple-external-gpu-vr-development-macos-high-sierra-wwdc-2017) went on sale yesterday for $599 with the following spec:

@unknownuser said:

the Apple-approved enclosure on the company’s website is a Sonnet external GPU chassis with Thunderbolt 3 support and a 350-watt power supply. The package comes with a AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics card, which is a VR-ready GPU. Developers will also get $100 toward a HTC Vive headset to use for VR purposes. You have to be a member of the Apple Developer Program to even be eligible to purchase the kit.

Also right on board with re the need for 32GB of RAM. Unfortunately yesterday's updates remain capped @ 16GB. This is a restriction of the KabyLake processors that they're speccing, not an Apple product management decision — we'll have to wait until Intel's next generation CannonLake chips for higher memory capacities to become available.

So I'm going to push off anything radical (like moving to Windows!) for the next year to give Apple time to make good on their promise to better meet the needs of their pro users. I was encouraged by what I saw from the WWDC announcements yesterday: while the iMac isn't the right machine for my needs, at least it shows that Apple has begun paying attention again.

@medeek said:

Now I've thoroughly beaten the FPSF option to death, the only thing I might add in later is a global setting to change the insulation color to pink, blue or white.

Is there an option for underslab insulation? What is the range of insulation thickness available?

Thanks for the info and reference to vCarve.

Been interested in CNC for a long time, and hope to be in a position to invest in a machine sometime over this next year. SU/vCarve looks like a good software solution.

@aceshigh said:

Although it complicates workflow, apparently this program does the same that Sketchup used to do, possibly even better (bigger 3D mesh areas in the highest resolution without having to add multiple grabs)...

But it costs U$250 for the version which can grab terrain meshes.

Looks like a business opportunity for CAD-Earth, given the number of people whose SU workflow depends on quality geo-imagery / terrain grabs. If they were to make their tool directly compatible with SU — and thereby resolve the workflow issues — I imagine their would be a raft of SU pros showing up at their door happy to pay $250 to replace the lost (critical) functionality.

Would be curious to know how extensive their coverage is... and how the've got around the API IP restrictions that are the claimed reason why SU can no longer provide this exact functionality from Google. Two possibilities spring to mind:

1. that they are skirting / impinging the restrictions.
2. That they have negotiated a license arrangement with Google that legally allows such usage.

If (2), then it has interesting implications for this discussion and the rationale provided for the degradation in SU 'Add Location' functionality. Hmmm...

@greatoe said:

This issue still remains. Mac OSX El Capitan 10.11, Sketchup 2015.

Same here: also Mac OSX El Capitan 10.11, SU Pro 2015. This is a plugin I would use a lot if it worked properly on Mac OS.

In our Passivhaus builds, this is the preferred foundation type for several reasons.

I think you would be surprised at the EPS insulation thickness under-slab... up to 14". Of course, this varies considerably with different climate zones. (We are in Quebec with winters where -40° is not unexpected)

There are modular slab insulation systems for FPSF. Iso-Slab is a Quebec-based one: http://www.iso-slab.com. Their web-site has technical info on these systems that may be of interest to you.

It was only when I tried opening Rich's in a new tab that it took 30 seconds to fail. When I clicked on the gif (without opening a new tab), it threw the error immediately - and still does with the smaller file.

Not to worry... pretty sure the problem is with my browser

Same error. It takes ~ 30 seconds for the tab to load, then it throws the error.

I thought it might be my browser extensions, but the problem persists even with extensions off.

When I click on airplane gif I get this each time:

I've had a similar problem on one other site (The Verge - which fails to even load the home page), so it's likely browser related. Both these have happened since the latest Safari update, so not sure if it broke something.

Anyone know what the issue might be? I'm running Safari on elCapitan (both with latest updates)

Thanks for the tip — will do.

I really like the mood that you've managed in this render: like you, I've spent a lot of nights over many years in similar settings... though not nearly as perfectly Mad Men / mid-century modern in style

Really nice work.