The intended users of ShadeSeek are architects or engineers who are designing temporary or permanent open-air structures that will be used to shade people from the sun.

There are many festivals and outdoor events where attendees are often standing outside for the whole day, completely exposed to the sun. ShadeSeek is a tool that can be used to design an open-air shelter (a shelter with a roof and no walls) to shade attendees from the sun. The goal of ShadeSeek is to optimize the dimensions of an open-air shelter to provide the most shaded area for the least amount of roof area.

The fixed inputs are the location where the open-air shelter is being constructed, the day(s) of the year that the event is happening on, and the area on the ground surrounding the open-air shelter where the shading will be observed. The variable inputs are the height of the open-air structure’s roof, the angle of the roof, and the length and width of the roof.

1. First the location and time of year of the event are set in Revit, then brought into Dynamo.
2. Next the roof is modeled as rectangular surface, with varying length and width, and varying height on the local West edge. The angle of the roof will also be varying around the axis of the local West edge, creating varying heights of the local East edge.
3. Next, columns are modeled, with one at each corner of the roof. They are not modeled based on any structural computations and they are simply there to help visualize what the structure may look like.
4. The shade study dimensions are then outlined, as a rectangle on the ground plane. This is the area over which the tool will compute if there is shade or not.
5. To quantify how much shade the open-air shelter is providing, the SolarAnalysis.Analyze node from the Solar Analysis for Dynamo package is used. This node computes the cumulative solar insolation for equally spaced points on a selected analysis surface. That analysis surface is the shade study area, that was defined in the previous step. The node also requires a shading surface input, weather, time study, and spacing inputs. This node will be used twice with all of the same inputs, except for the shading surface input. One node instance will compute the cumulative solar insolation with the roof surface as the shading surface and the other node instance will compute the cumulative solar insolation with an arbitrarily defined surface on the ground plane as the shading surface. The surface on the ground plane simulates no shading surface, since the analysis surface is also on the ground plane, and this produces the cumulative total insolation on the analysis surface if there were no shading at all. To compute the cumulative shaded area, the cumulative solar insolation with the roof shading is subtracted from the cumulative solar insolation without any shading. This cumulative shaded area is computed at every calculation point defined on the analysis surface, so to compute the total shaded area, the cumulative shaded area is multiplied by the square of the spacing input.
6. The roof area can be extracted from the roof surface using the Surface.Area node. The two outputs of this Generative Design Study are the roof area and the shaded area.
7. Since this a 3-unit project, an additional visual output was created. This visual output is the shade map, which updates with every variation produced in the Generative Design Study. The shade map is a darker blue color where the ground is more shaded and lighter where the ground receives less shade throughout the whole time study. To create the shade map, the shaded area at each calculation point is computed by subtracting the cumulative solar insolation with the roof shading from the cumulative solar insolation without any shading, similarly to how the total shaded area was computed. This list of values is flattened and then remapped to be within a range of 0-1, 0 being the least shaded area and 1 being the most shaded area. The calculation points output from the SolarAnalysis.Analyze node is extracted and used to create a grid of rectangular surfaces on the ground plane. The rectangular surfaces are then colored based on the remapped shade values.

The outputs are the total shaded area over a set amount of time and the roof area of the open-air shelter. To make this a 3-unit tool, a shade map is created as a visual output to help the designer see which specific areas on the ground surface will be the most shaded throughout the entire time study.

One limitation of this tool is that the thickness of the roof is not considered. Only the surface of the roof is considered a shading element with the current node logic. The columns are also not considered as shading elements, and the area that they take up on the ground plane is not removed from the total shaded area. There are no structural considerations in this tool, such as necessary strength or size of columns or necessary structural members such as beams or joists. The roof is modeled as a rectangle but the code can be easily updated to analyze different roof shapes.

ShadeSeek is a Generative Design Study that optimizes the length, width, height above ground, and angle of a roof to maximize the shaded ground area and minimize the roof area.

ShadeSeek computes the amount of shaded area that is provided by open-air shelters with varying roof sizes. A shade map is generated where the darker blue represents more shaded area over the entire time period of the study. The study location and time period must be defined in Revit. The roof area for each shelter is also computed.