Texture Rendering & Colour Preferences

 

 

·       Bump mapping

·       Specular mapping

 

These two options give a more realistic display of textures when the texture option is applied in the model viewer.

 

This allows you to select the type of units used for data input and output: Metric or US IP (Inch-Pound / Imperial).

If US IP units are selected, you must additionally specify the format used to display lengths in feet-and-inches:

·       Decimal - Display feet as a decimal number, with no separate inches part:

o   e.g. 3.125'

·       Engineering - Display feet and inches, with the inches part displayed as a decimal fraction:

o   e.g. 3’-1.5”

·       Architectural - Display feet, inches, and fractions of an inch (longhand):

o   e.g. 3’-1 ½”

Note that you can enter feet-and-inches in any of the above formats, regardless of the display format selected.

 

 

Enable Faster Calculations & Auto-Shading Generation

·       This feature allows SunCast to use the multiple cores in your machine (if available) to calculate several time steps simultaneously.

·       Doing so will greatly reduce the overall simulation time (while using more of your computer’s resources).

·       Each SunCast licence allows you to use up to 4 cores.  Additional licences may be used to increase the number of cores used in the simulation.

·       When enabled, any Apache thermal simulations that require SunCast solar shading data will automatically generate it if it does not exist.

·       The setting is global and applies to all SunCast runs.

·       Important: To use this feature you must have a multi-core machine and Microsoft’s MPI library installed.  If for some reason it was not installed as part of the VE installation, or has been subsequently removed, you can download it here (VE2013FP1 onwards, or side-by-side use with VE2015) or here (VE2015 onwards).

·       Note: Due to the way parallel simulations are run, specifying the use of 2 cores is equivalent to using just 1 core.  However the option is still quicker than turning faster calculations off completely.

 

Allows you to set various options with regards to importing inner volumes in models from other sources such as gmXML and IFC.

 

Allows you to set various options with regards to importing models from other sources such as gmXML and IFC.

 

 

 

This allows you to select which colours are active when using the software. The main use is to change the default canvas colour from white to black (and grid from black to white), but there are a number of other elements that are listed that you can change to what you prefer.

 

Allows you to change the default colours and textures used for all the specified object types within the VE.