Material Templates
The Material Template is typically an Excel sheet where you assemble a series of BHoM Material Objects that consist of a Density, an Environmental Product Declaration (an entry from a Dataset), and a MaterialName. The material name should match the object's material name or names - depending on the number of layers (think of a layered wall or floor assembly). These material names could be assigned in Revit, or they can be assigned directly within your BHoM workflow.
Before you start your Excel workbook, you'll want to query the objects you want to evaluate for their Material names using this handy Query Engine method called 'ElementMaterialNames'. Then in your Excel workbook you can add those names to Column A via copy/paste (we won't want any spelling mistakes here!)
The mass per unit volume, in kg/m3 (BHoM is always in SI!), place this in your next column in Excel.
This is where you get to select from the many Environmental Product Declaration Datasets in BHoM, using the Excel CreateData dropdown, where you'll go to LifeCycleAssessment and your dataset of choice.
Then you get to assemble your Material object, first you select the object itself either by using (Ctrl+Shift+B) and searching for Material (the one with the Density, Properties and Name) or by searching in the menu.
You'll then use the Excel prompts to enter your Density cell, EPD cell and Name cell into the Material object. You'll do this for each of the materials that you want to construct.
The last step is pushing all of those materials you made as a single JSON file. You'll want to set up a 'FileAdapter' and a 'Push' component, with a 'PushType' enum, the File Name, Folder Name and FALSE are all text. Push and File Adapter can be found in the locations shown highlighted in the image below. The PushType enum is also shown below.
The final assembled MaterialTemplate should look something like the below when completed:
Once you're back in Grasshopper working with LCA Toolkit (see the Environmental Results Section you'll want to Pull your MaterialTemplate, you can do so with the FileAdapter (even more simply than with the Push!) Welcome to the wonderful world of interoperability.
