Dear all.
EnVi has now been transferred over to Blender 2.8, and most of the changes the user will see are within EnVi. The EnVi material system has been converted into a node system to allow up the EnergyPlus maximum of 10 layers in constructions. EnVi now supports the simulation of photovoltaics and phase change materials and you can now save your custom materials and constructions to a JSON database.
An example of an EnVi Material node set-up
The other major change in EnVi is that as ‘Layers’ now no longer exist in Blender – ‘Collections’ are used instead – EnergyPlus zones are specified by the Blender objects contained within collections. This allows multiple Blender objects to make up an EnergyPlus zone, and this has some advantages I hope to make use of in the future. I have not yet however finalised the logic of how muliple Blender objects become one EnergyPlus zone.
In other news the VI-Suite is now completely self-contained within the addon zip folder (at least on Windows and Linux). This means that you can install in Blender the git zip directly, and it will hopefully make it easier to get the VI-Suite working on a variety of Linux platforms.
I have general bug fixing still to do and Wind Rose display to finish, but I am hoping to announce a beta release for testing soon.
There is one fly in the ointment. The Blender 2.8 series does not currently allow the keyframing of custom node parameters. As most of the Vi-Suite parameters exposed to the user are custom node parameters, it means that automated parametric analysis is largely not possible. This has been recognised by the Blender developers and if you want to register your interest in getting this fixed you can do so at https://developer.blender.org/T66392. The more people asking for it to be fixed the more likely it is to be fixed.
Regards
Ryan
Hello everybody, I am trying to get the vi suite 06 to work under Blender 2.82 on arch linux (manjaro). Could someone explain me what the procedure is? I downloaded the zip file from github and importet it as an adon through blender. Then i changed the bin files n RadFiles/Linux/bin to be executable. I then installed the dependencys in the Python/Linux folder manually through my software manager. I don’t know if that is where the problem comes from but some of those packages had a newer version than those in the Python/Linux folder and for some i was not able to install them (kivy-garden). i have a problem when i try to previw a LiVi simulation (there is just a black blender window for some seconds and i get the error that rvu is not able to open a command window) and im not able to visualize a LiVi simulation once its calculated (it tells me about a illu error). I would really apreciate any help. It would already help me to have a list of those dependency packages which have to be installed to make Vi-suite run on archlinux. If someone is willing to help me i could attach the errors that i get in the logs. Thank you very much.
Hi.
VI-Suite for 2.8 has not been released yet and I am still working on it, albeit slowly with everything going on right now.
When it does get released I will post on here.
Cheers
Ryan
Dear Ryan,
need a hand.. contact the guys at Osarch.org
we can’t wait for vi-suite-0.6 to come out.
Lukas
When will there be a release of 0.6 on windows (and some video to know how it work) ? It’s been years since this project seem’s scilent.
You can try it now if you want. Install the zip file you get from https://github.com/rgsouthall/vi-suite06/archive/master.zip in Blender 2.83.6 LTS from the addon window. The main problem is that I have not finished the documentation yet.
Any bugs report on the github page. Any other questions can go on the Google Group https://groups.google.com/g/vi-suite
Cheers
Ryan