Show Compliance Pass/Fail Areas on Daylight Distribution Map

Modified on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 at 04:25 PM

DesignBuilder's default daylight map outputs provide a detailed view of the distribution of daylight availability across the selected internal area. Sometimes however it can be useful to view the areas in each zone that comply/do not comply with the requirements of the daylight standard or scheme in use.

To help with this you can make some simple custom display settings to display compliant areas in green and non-compliant areas in red in a "traffic light" style display

To do this for sDA 300/50% results follow the steps below after running sDA/ASE/UDI daylight simulations.

  1. Navigate to the part of the building of interest (zone, block or building level). 
  2. In the Display Options panel, under the Scale header, change the Source to 4-User-defined. This allows you to set high and low thresholds with colours to represent areas where those thresholds are exceeded.
  3. Set the 'Low value' to 50 indicating that any sDA output lower than 50% of occupied periods is considered not to be autonomous in daylight. Set the 'High value' to 0.
  4. Check the 'Apply scale "too dark" colour' checkbox and set the corresponding colour to red to indicate fail. 
  5. Likewise, check the 'Apply scale "too bright" colour' checkbox and set the corresponding colour to green to indicate a pass.
  6. Your daylight map display should now show compliant areas in green and non-compliant areas in red.

Similar custom display settings can be made for ASE, daylight factor, UDI etc. For example, the images below compare standard daylight factor distribution map outputs with a "traffic light" style output which shows areas with daylight factor < 2% in red.


You can find more information about daylight display options in the Program Help

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