It's that time of year again when Subscription customers receive additional functionality through the Subscription Advantage Packs. For Revit Architecture and Revit MEP customers there is a lot to look forward to with regards to early understanding of a building's potential energy performance.
As alluded to in the Autodesk You Tube Channel video on Conceptual Analysis from earlier this year, you now have the ability to perform integrated energy analysis of conceptual models, utilising the power of the Cloud to prevent disruption to workflow.
At the heart of the technology is the Autodesk Climate Server which utilises more than 1.5 million weather data sets across the majority of the Globe. Fundamentally you are seeing the leveraging of Green Building Studio technology within Revit.
It is going to be really interesting to see how customers embrace this and how far they take it.
I'll elaborate in more detail another day but for now here is a quick overview.
The first thing you will notice after installing the Advantage Pack is the appearance of a Subscription Sign in. This will allow you to access the Subscription Only web services.
You will also notice the appearance of some new Ribbon items, one to setup, perform and review results and the other to control the visualisation of the energy mass model:
The Location dialog now contains the weather stations from Climate Server:
The Energy Settings will enable you to determine the conceptual constructions and systems to use, and how to rationalise the massing:
You can use in-place masses and masses loaded from the Conceptual Massing environment. The model will be rationalised based on the energy settings or you can manually edit the form to change aspects such as glazing or zone size:
It is also straightforward to export the gbXML from the results page so you can also use the CEA tools to create energy models for use in other analysis tools, something I hear time and again as being problematic for customers, both natively in the analysis tool or when exporting the room based gbXML from Revit.
And finally you'll see a results window that returns the analysis results from the Cloud and enables you to compare multiple design iterations:
All in a really great step forward in combining cloud based computing with the Revit product set for early analysis. For us here in Europe there are a couple of points to note, namely it is not possible in this version to change the currency from the dollar or customise the energy costs as can be done in Green Building Studio. I don't see this as a showstopper though as there is a lot more to be gained from the energy model construction and analysis than just a lifecycle cost estimate. I would be interested to get feedback from fellow Europeans on your view of the tool and it's use.
Tutorial Videos are available from here:
There is also a comprehensive online help guide accessible from Revit.
In addition to the CEA tool, Subscription Customers will also gain access to Revit Server technology to help with dispersed team work and new extensions.
