Sefaira, one of the leading software designers for high-performance building design, have recently announced a new real-time daylight analysis and visualisation tool which runs within Autodesk Revit. Sefaira for Revit allows for early stage analysis, leading to “more informed design decisions based on multiple daylighting metrics.” The software leverages industry leading and widely trusted daylighting analysis engines such as Radiance and DAYSIM to provide key metrics including daylight levels at specific times, annual availability of quality daylight (also known as Daylight Autonomy), annual risk of glare, as well as Daylight Factor. Ultimately, they hope that having this information at the initial stages in the design process will make client discussions and important design decisions simpler.
This is the second guest lecture of Solvia Studioat Stanford, talking about design flexibility using design options and diving a bit deeper into some conceptual energy analysis concepts using Autodesk's Green Building Studio. More advanced customization of mass energy settings and the web-based analysis environment of GBS were introduced.
For the whole class series, please visit: BIMTopia
Solvia Studio was invited to participate as a guest lecturer for BIM Energy Analysis as a part of Stanford University's Building Information Modeling class. It's a foundational Building Information Modeling course that introduces techniques for the creation, management, and application of building information models in the building design and construction process. The lecture included a walkthrough of conceptual energy analysis basics, using the Green Building Studio analysis engine within the Revit environment to quickly evaluate energy consumption and assess performance goals. For the whole class series, please visit: BIMTopia
An overview on the main issues of the building industry and how the disruptive trend of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is changing the way buildings are designed and approached in general. BIM models and energy simulations were showcased.
The building envelope is one of the major factors that affect building performance. Spending time optimizing the building's skin with regards to various factors like permeability, amount of glazing, conductivity etc, will definitely pay off later during the operations phase of the life-cycle with increased comfort and efficiency levels. On the above basis, it's not difficult to grasp the value of performing analyses early in the design process that will assist informed decision making, not only about design but also about systems, construction etc. Traditional CAD workflows though, make this "analyses injection" time consuming and (often) expensive to perform during design stage. The BIM process mitigates the above obstacles by allowing the integration of energy analysis early in the design phase - even as early as the conceptual design stage. There are BIM tools out there that "inform" conceptual design, by allowing users to perform fast and whole (usually) energy analysis. One of the most interesting and user friendly technologies I've got my hands on is the Sefaira Concept. Sefaira offers a plugin for SketchUp that runs energy analysis of a building without leaving the design environment so that architects and design professionals can immediately assess the impact of design decisions proactively in the design process. It also contains several cool features that further assist architects to methodically design more efficient buildings (i.e. Response Curves that depict how far you are from your target and help you optimize green and energy factors like orientation, R-Values etc) Read more: Sefaira New Energy Analysis Software
