The Sustainable Design Toolbox

New Autodesk Green Building Studio Release

A new release of Autodesk Green Building Studio has gone live with some great new features, some in particular aimed at existing portfolio analysis:

Utility Building History Upload. Now you can upload the utility history of existing buildings to compare to your simulation results. In the Run List you can now view and edit utility data that is currently assigned to a project.

Historical Weather Data. Over 10 years of historical data is automatically selected for your project location. Now when you upload the billing history of your existing building, the weather data is automatically synchronised to that billing period.

Run Results Charts. New Monthly and Annual results charts allow you to quickly sort and review a large number of runs in your project.

gbXML file Upload. Now you can upload gbXML files without a desktop client.

There has also been some tidying up of the interface and one nice enhancement I noticed is your currency is automatically selected for your project location, no more need for me to trawl through a long list looking for GB Pounds :-)

BIM Show Live 2011

Tomorrow is BIM Show Live Day in London, an event covering all aspects of the BIM lifecycle. I'll be there presenting Rapid Energy Modelling, using BIM for portfolio analysis. See the agenda here:

BIM Show Live Agenda

If you are there, be sure to say hello.

Conceptual Energy Analysis & CFD Overview

I recently had a requirement to create an overview whitepaper for Autodesk tools that can be used for early stage energy analysis. With help from my Simulation colleague Jonah Normand, we have outlined Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis, Project Vasari, Green Building Studio and Simulation CFD tools. I thought I would share as you may find it useful:

Download Autodesk & Sustainability - Conceptual Building Performance Analysis Overview

(Best to right click and open in a new window)

AEC Webinar Series

 
The Northern Europe Technical Team are running a series of webcasts on various AEC products and workflows, some have already been run and recorded, others are scheduled for live presentation over the next few months.

You can register for upcoming webinars and watch the recordings at:

AEC Webinars

Please note the times are set from the UK, so either British Summer Time or GMT.

Sustainability Tools on the Autodesk Cloud

 
Last week Autodesk announced Autodesk Cloud, an offering for customers featuring a range of web based capabilities. Some of the functionality is new, some has been around for some time. From the sustainable design perspective, two of the previously available energy analysis tools are included, namely Autodesk Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis and Autodesk Green Building Studio, videos of which can be found below:

  

 

Further details on the benefits of Autodesk Cloud and how to access them can be found at:

Autodesk Cloud

World Green Building Week 2011

 
This week is World Green Building Week with numerous events taking place around the Globe. Be sure to check out the World Green Building Council list for events taking place in your region:

WGBC Events

Project Vasari 2.1 available

Bit late to the party posting about this, but last week Project Vasari 2.1 was released to Autodesk Labs. You can download it from here:

Project Vasari 2.1

This version brings more cool stuff from Ecotect with the inclusion of the Wind Tunnel:

 

Zach Kron has a great blog post on this functionality here:

Buildz Ecotect Wind Tunnel Post 

Also improved with this release is the automatic zoning of the energy model. Previously zones were divided based on points of the compass, now they are divided based on the building geometry - which overcomes the sometimes rather odd divisions you got before:

Finally check out the parameters slider add-in that works with 2.1, more details here:

Parameters Sliders

Autodesk Sustainability Workshop - Net Zero Energy Building Design

 
The Autodesk Sustainability Team have just launched another great set of educational videos, this time focusing on the built environment.

The series contains four videos covering the following subjects:

• Energy Loads and Net Zero Energy Buildings Strategy
• Passive Heating, Cooling and Ventilation Strategy
• Lighting and Daylighting Design
• Efficient HVAC Design Strategy

You can check them out here:

Net Zero Energy Buildings Sustainability Workshop

 

ECOBIM Clean Tech Partner

 

The Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program supports pioneers in the sustainable design field and my colleague Jerker Hagglund alerted me to one such company in Norway who are benefiting from this program.

Read more about ECOBIM and the services they offer here:

ECOBIM Website

You can find out more about the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program here:

Autodesk Cleantech

BIM Working Party Strategy Document

 
At a customer BIM event yesterday I polled the audience of approximately 80 people and only two or three had downloaded and read the UK Government's Construction Strategy and the subsequent BIM Working Group Strategy documents released end of May and end of June respectively. For convenience I thought I would post the links to both:

UK Government Construction Strategy

UK Government BIM Working Party Strategy

For anyone working in the UK on government projects these are vital reading as they outline the strategy for improving the performance of the government's estate in terms of cost, value and carbon in the coming years and BIM will play an important part in achieving that.