I was lucky enough to attend my first autodesk university this year, and I am completely hooked. I haven’t been this inspired since I was in school- I took copious amounts of notes, and only about half of them were about the actual presentations. the others were ideas for building systems, performative organizations, and green designs. I feel both better educated and reinvigorated- if you ever have the opportunity to attend, you really should.

while I was at AU I was able to sit in on many tutorials and demos of various sustainable analysis software. while there were many programs with interesting sustainable implications for enhanced paper-less communication, many of these I’ll describe in greater detail in future posts, the environmental analysis programs are worth mentioning themselves.

the basic landscape for energy analysis programs for architects using revit can be reduced down to three software packages: ecotect, IES VE, and green building studio. each of these programs can interface directly with revit files or standard BIM exports (.gbxml or .dxf). they all provide a range of data based off of design decisions made in a revit model to be used to inform the design during variety of design phases.

of the three, ecotect is clearly the most impressive- both the range of analysis and the graphical output (both IES VE and GBS only produce text based information) is far superior and could also inform the largest range of design phases. but it is also the most buggy- I saw two presentations by dr. andrew marsh where 10 – 20% of the commands and scripts did not work. unfortunately, it was a different 10 – 20% each time. with autodesk’s recent acquisition of ecotect, and with robert aish in the attendance for both sessions, hopefully some progress will be made on that front.

while the analysis dr. marsh was doing was extremely impressive and wide ranging (everything from right to light analysis to component form generation), it was difficult to tell how easily accomplished the analysis was. he was running a list of custom scripts within the program itself, so I wasn’t able to tell how much of the power of ecotect was accessible through simple native commands or how much scripting was necessary to achieve his results. ecotect is that it is a free standing program that uses .gbxml or .dfx file formats- both of which are exportable from revit.

IES VE is an integrated toolbar that operates within the revit environment. the standalone version of IES is notoriously difficult for non-engineers to use, and IES VE is an attempt to remedy that. while IES VE is simple and doesn’t require exporting files, it produces a large amount of specific data that architects are typically not trained to understand. in this regard, IES VE is a fairly useful tool for evaluating multiple designs, and not as much as a generative tool like ecotect can be.

green building studio is by far the easiest of the three to use, but also produces the most limited range of data. GBS is a web-based application that only requires the upload of a .gbxml model in order to evaluate the design’s performance. it does fall into a similar category as IES VE, in that it seems to be a very good tool for evaluating various schemes in comparison to each other, but it is not as good at informing a design as it is being generated.

green building studio does have a unique advantage over ecotect and IES VE- the weather information ecotect and IES VE base their calculations on is typically taken from the nearest airport, while GBS’ weather stations are on a roughly 12 mile by 12 mile grid across the country. you can even verify where your weather information is coming from in a google maps app. this probably wouldn’t effect all projects, but it certainly would effect a project in downtown san francisco which has a dramatically different climate than SFO.

so there isn’t exactly one program that does everything, but ecotect seemed to be the most impressive. coming up- digital communication software and other programs that could help minimize the use of paper within a practice.

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