Ecotect for site analysis

Before even thinking about the brief, or some initial forms, there is a lot of information to be gathered from the site. Much of this is quite specic, and makes you feel like you got something for your money from those ve years of study, but there is quite a lot, especially environmental information, that can be gathered quite mechanically. As this data comes essentially for free1, its a big help at the beginning of a project.

This isnt necessarily bad, it just gives the impression of less reliable data, so if you are happy with the legitimacy of your source, then thats ne.

Im only going to give a very quick overview of each of these tools to whet your appetite. a much more complete explanation is available from the ecotect help les. capturing graphics for reports The wonderful thing about all this beautiful data visualisation is that its incredibly compelling, and convincing. What do you do with it all though? If you walked around the Architectural Association summer show a few years ago all youd see was rows and rows of meaningless tiny black rectangles. Doing screen grabs seems like the only way to get images out, but fear not, there is a better way!
0 4 8 12 10 8 6 4 I R R A D CLIMATE SUMMARY D A Y L T LATITUDE: -34.9 NAME: Ad e la id e 138.6 LOCATION: So uth Austra lia LONGITUDE: DESIGN SKY: No t Av a ila b le TIMEZONE: +9.5 hrs ALTITUDE: 20.5 m
We a the r T o o l

the weather manager

It might seem odd, but the rst thing that we are going to do is to not start Ecotect. we are going to work through some really really fundamental things that are area specic, then once weve done that we can start on the site specic stu in Ecotect. You can launch the weather manager from the Start menu. It will be in the Autodesk >> Ecotect folder.
0 4 8 CLIMATE SUMMARY D A Y L T LATITUDE: -34.9 NAME: Ad e la id e 138.6 LOCATION: So uth Austra lia LONGITUDE: DESIGN SKY: No t Av a ila b le TIMEZONE: +9.5 hrs ALTITUDE: 20.5 m
We a the r T o o l

Get some weather data

The rst thing that we need to get hold of is some weather data from a source somewhere near the site. It doesnt need to be exactly where the site is, but the nearer the better. Weather data is usually captured in cities by the government meteorologists, or at airports where its useful for air trac control. Quite a lot of .wea les are delivered with the basic ecotect install, but there are heaps more on the web site http://ecotect.com/ downloads/weatherdata there is also information there about importing weather data from other formats like .epw which is the energy plus weather data format. Weather manager. This To inspect the weather data, use the is a separate application that comes with Ecotect. It is a weather data viewer, however that description doesnt really do it justice, it would be better to describe it as a tool for understanding climates. The most important thing to remember is to be suspicious of your weather data, and to use a bit of common sense when interpreting it. Not all data sets are complete, and not all of them are very good. You should be looking for a reasonably lumpy set of data. If your graphs are too smooth, the odds are that the data has been interpolated between relatively few readings.
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In the bottom left of the window there is a button that looks like a camera. If you click that it gives you the option to copy the graph (the black bit of the screen) to the clip board, either as a Bitmap - which is essentially a ready trimmed screen grab (bah, no good), or as a Metale - which is a vector graphic format (yay, really useful).
0 100 500 8k DEGREE HOURS (Hea ng, Cooling and Solar) 80 60 40 20 0 J F MA M J J A S O N D 0 400 6k 300 4k S 200 100 2k C H 0k J F M A M J J A S O N D

graph type

main viewer

weather le explorer

Once it has started up, it will show the Location data graphs. There are a range of dierent ways to view the data on the left, along with controls to aect the way it is displayed. In the middle, is the display of the data. In this window you can navigate (either pan for 2d views, or orbit for 3d) with the right mouse button, and zoom with the wheel. On the right, there is a list of weather data les. It only displays the ones that you have saved in the default weather data folder, so if you have more data les, put them in there. (C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Ecotect\Weather Data by default.)

The problem arises when you want to get the data o the clip board. If you just dump it into word itll look terrible. Youll need to use a specialised vector editing program like Adobe Illustrator, or its excellent and free counterpart, Inkscape. Once you have a new document open in front of you in your vector package, you can just paste the data straight into it. You can then do any amount of tweaking you want, changing the font to t the rest of your report, changing line thicknesses, colours, removing labels etc. etc. Then you can output it as whatever is most useful for your report. Weekly data Confusingly, the weekly data graph shows a whole years worth of data on one graph. It plots weeks of the year along the long axis, hours of the day along the short axis, and then the value for that particular point in time on the Z axis (up). As such, it creates data landscapes that describe the years weather. Average Temperature Maximum Temperature Minimum Temperature Relative Humidity Direct Solar Radiation Diuse Solar Radiation Wind Speed Cloud Cover Daily rainfall The controls allow you to ick between dierent data sets, and ways of displaying that data.

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mine weather data for insight

Traditionally (not being that old, Im guessing here) architects would get a feel for the climate of a site by actually going there, probably on several dierent occasions, and at dierent times to see how the sun fell on the site, or how it changed through the seasons. These days were all too busy and stressed to actually go outside, so we can make a simulation of what it might be like to be there. Initially this sounds like a poor substitute, and alone it probably would be, but used in concert with traditional site visits, it can be very enlightening. We shall see later when we get onto sunlight studies how useful it can be to see a whole days solar activity in a matter of seconds, but for the moment, we are interested in an even greater level of abstraction for the moment.

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well, without having to think too much.

The show all button, surprisingly enough, shows all the graphs at once, so that you can scan between them and make comparisons.
C 5 0 C 5 0 C 5 0 4 0 4 0 4 0

The top graph - monthly diurnal averages - is a bit impenetrable initially, so Ill try and break it down here. The scale along the bottom is broken into months, but then each column is subdivided not into days, but into hours. This is an averaging of the data from the whole month, so for example, it shows that months trend.

being bounced about by clouds and other particulates in the atmosphere. The dotted line is the energy that has been bounced. The bottom graph is a snapshot of a particular day. Again, we need to apply a fair bit of scepticism to these data as they are captured a particular point in time, and are not representative of trends over a longer period. Nonetheless the Daily Conditions graph is useful for providing an idea of what the conditions can be like. You can click anywhere on the top graph, and the bottom graph will update to show the conditions as they were on that day. This kind of abstract data tourism is all very well, but the real power comes when you can mine the data for specic events.

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The left axis is temperature in C and the right side is radiation in watts per metre squared (w/m2). Helpfully, these scales are xed, so you can change the weather le and see the comparative dierence easily. OK, onto the content.

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The thin blue line running through the middle of the red gradient is the average temperature, so you can see that it gets a bit hotter around lunch time, and a bit colder at night etc.
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Ho est Day (peak) Ho est Day (Average) Coldest Day (peak) Coldest Day (Average) Brightest Sunny day Most Overcast Day Strongest Wind Gust Most Windy Day Least Windy Day

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In hindsight, the correlations between the graphs seem incredibly obvious, but they are easy to miss. For example. In a tropical country, the obvious thing to expect is that in the summer the temperature and the direct solar radiation would rise and fall together, i.e. hot and sunny go together. In reality, as the monsoons come at the height of summer, the heat stays, but the direct solar radiation (and to a certain extent the diuse) falls o sharply as dark clouds ll the sky. Hourly data The Hourly Data graphs do the same confusing trick as the Weekly Data graphs - they actually display way more than an hours worth of information.
C MONTHLY DIURNAL AVERAGES - Melbourne, Victoria - Australia W/m

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The red gradient shows a range of the extremes. This is actually a lot more useful, as insulation and plant are usually sized to deal with the extremes of temperature. This isnt always the case though, the Eden Projects Education Resource Centre2 has been designed with the realisation that (traditionally) the peaks in temperature occur only very rarely, and therefore they allow the system to fail predictably. This allows a huge saving in plant costs, enough to cover two classrooms, one that is unusable in peak cold, and one that is unusable in peak heat. The green band is the comfort zone that someone wearing clothes appropriate for that season would like to be in. It goes down in winter as people generally wear more to cope with the outside temperature, so they dont want to have to strip o as they come inside. The inverse is true for summer, people dont want to carry around a jumper to wear inside. This has implications for working out whether a particular passive technique will be appropriate, as the range of acceptable temperatures for inside varies with the temperature outside.3 Thats it for temperature on that graph, the other two lines are about solar radiation. The solid line is the direct solar radiation, this means the amount energy that comes from the sun without
2 3 Image shamelessly pinched from the Buro Happold website http:// www.burohappold.com/BH/PRJ_BLD_eden_project_phase_iv.aspx For more on this issue, look up clo ratings and predicted mean vote

You can search for the extremes of temperature, solar radiation, and wind, and then use them to set the boundaries for your design. Be careful though, as the data that comes with Ecotect was mostly collected before 2002, and the extremes of weather have shifted even in this short time, so cross check what you are told with what your experience tells you. More information can be gathered from the data by looking at the other Summary data views.

Wind Analysis The wind analysis page can be very helpful at the early stages of a project to just get a feel for how the site will behave.
Prevailing Winds Wind Frequency (Hrs) Loca on: Melbourne Date: 1st January - 31st December Time: 00:00 - 24:00
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It can give you an idea of the plausibility of various passive design possibilities, and also likelihoods of windy spots on the site. However, wind is a lot more temperamental than the sun. Whereas we can predict the suns position with a pretty good degree of accuracy hundreds of years into the future, what the wind will do tomorrow is still a matter of informed guesses and witchcraft. Wind is aected by micro climates, and can be channelled by the surroundings. If you need to know what the wind is up to on your site, there are only really two options, either get out there with an anemometer, or build a computational uid dynamics (CFD) model, and in the latter case, youll probably need to go and take site readings to verify the computer model.

Psychometry Explanation to come Sunpath diagram Explanation to come

or setting attributes in this view. It is also possible to capture this view as a metale for vector work. Visualise is an Open GL view of the model. Open GL is a visualisation tool used by the gaming industry, so it can display a lot of information very quickly. It is used for viewing the model in a shaded view, and also for viewing shadows. It isnt possible to capture a vector version of this screen, but Ecotect does allow you to make a virtual screen to to very large screen grabs so that you can get print resolution images from the visualise window. Analysis and Reports are generally used for thermal calculations, and for producing compliance reports. They are beyond the scope of this document, but theres nothing stopping you from having a look in the help le if you are interested. 3 - The main bit: This is were the magic happens. This is an extension of the tabs to the left, when you click one of those tabs, this bit of the screen changes.

Ecotect

4 - The tabs on the right give you access to all the ecotect specic tools.
hrs 311+ 279 248 217 186 155 124 93 62 <31

What the wind analysis is useful for is nding out what type of wind you have, and what time of day it arrives. Quite often the wind ows from the coast to the land in the morning, and in the opposite direction in the afternoon. If you have a situation like in Melbourne where there is a hot desert in the land direction, and Antarctica in the sea direction, then there are going to be signicant dierences in the wind temperature. This has ramications for how you implement something like night purging. You can also view the data month by month, and then further lter that by time. Below is the wind temperatures for wind during the night, in Melbourne, broken up into monthly chunks.
50 km/h 40 km/h 30 km/h 20 km/h 10 km/h 50 km/h 40 km/h 30 km/h 20 km/h 10 km/h 50 km/h 40 km/h 30 km/h 20 km/h 10 km/h

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The Ecotect interface borrows from a few other packages (3D Studio Max, Microstation, etc.), so you might nd that iss quite intuitive, or you might not get it at all to begin with. Its broken up into 4 parts.

Selection Information - object properties can be viewed and updated here Zone Management - Zones are a lot like layers/levels in other programs. Material Assignment - As we are trying to simulate real things, for some types of analysis we need to give them real material attributes.

Wind Frequency (Hrs)

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1 2 3 4

Display settings controls the visualise view. Clipping planes, colours, Cameras, and transparency are controlled here. Shadow Settings contains all the controls for shadow display, and shows/hides the sunpath. The Analysis Grid tab has the controls for the fast analysis grid (often called the blue grid). You can show/hide it from here, and also do several types of calculation. Rays & Particles is mainly used for acoustic analysis, but there are some solar related tools in here. Parametric Objects is really a console for running scripts that draw things. Ecotect ships with a few already (pitched roof, spiral etc.), but it is possible to make your own if you are so inclined. Object Transformation contains the tools you need to move, rotate or array objects. The Export Manager has a variety of lter that will pump out your model ready for another package to read it. There are geometry based ones like DXF and VRML and more specic formats like gbXML and energyplus. This is where youd interface with radiance.

Average Rela ve Humidity

50 km/h 40 km/h 30 km/h 20 km/h 10 km/h C 45+ 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 <0

1 - Menu & tool bars: These are much like other packages, saving, opening, printing etc. as well as access to all the other Ecotect specic tools are up in this row.
Average Wind Temperatures
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2 - Window tabs: These ick between dierent views of your model. Project is a general collection page. It show a summary of the project, as well as any notes that you have made. You set things like the specic location, and north oset in this tab. 3D editor is where you do all the interacting with the model. Youd do things like manipulating geometry,

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BMT Fluid Mechanics Limited http://www.bmtfm.com/?/377/399/366 5 May Helicoid propeller anemometer incorporating a wind vane June July August 50for orientation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prop_vane_km/h km/h 50 km/h 50 km/h 50 40 km/h 40 km/h 40 km/h 40 km/h 30anemometer.jpg km/h 30 km/h 30 km/h 30 km/h
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Getting Started
When you rst re up ecotect, itll either be in the project or new features view. Well come back to that in a minute, but for the moment, lets learn how to do some simple solar analysis. Hold on! Before we can do any analysis, we need something to analyse! We would usually import some geometry from somewhere else, but we can also model inside Ecotect, which makes more sense for the moment. Ecotects most common object is the zone. A zone is a bit of a tough thing to dene as there are some conicting ideas around, but the simplest way to explain it is that its an airtight volume with planar boundaries. Or in other words, a box (of any shape) that has at sides, and that if it were lled with water, would not spill - no matter how you tipped it. Drawing a zone zone icon. Then click four Go to the 3D Editor, and click the points in a rough square on the grid.

Good zone naming seems like a nuisance at this stage, but in the long term will save a lot of confusion. Flick to the visualise tab, and see what your model looks like in there.

wall. Once youve wrapped your head around that one, itll make sense that it makes no sense to draw a window without a wall to contain it. As such, windows in Ecotect are child objects. This means that they have a relationship to the wall that they are in. When you move a wall with a window, the window moves with it. To draw a window, you need to select a wall to be its parent. To do this, click on one of the edges of that wall. If you are lucky, the edges of that wall will thicken up to show that they are selected. If you are unlucky, the face next to the one you want will light up, and youll be left scratching your head. Fear not, there is a solution! Simply press [space] and the face will ip to the one you want.

A brief word about view navigation. Right mouse button orbits, the left makes whatever tool you have selected from the bar on the left do its thing, and the wheel zooms in and out. There is a block of F keys from F5 to F8 that controls the views. F5 takes you to plan view F6 and F7 are side views F8 is the perspective view Have a play with the various view tools in the settings box. visualisation Click the child objects button (the one that looks suspiciously like a window) and four more buttons will roll out. These are the dierent types of child object that Ecotect supports; Windows, voids, panels, doors. In a slightly unintuitive move, for solar analysis, we are going to use voids as they are a bit safer for analysis. To draw the window, just go ahead and draw directly onto the wall, Ecotect knows that you are drawing on the wall and not the oor, so itll look right when you are nished. Again, right click and escape from the last edge.
Fn Ctrl Alt

Show Help Page... Undo Add Zone Select Previous Select all

Thats all very well, but at this point someone always puts their hand up and asks can I draw things accurately? At this point, everybody groans, and things ..boring... but the answer is yes, you can draw accurately and well do it right now! Go back to the 3D Editor, drag a box around the zone weve drawn and press [delete]. Were back to a fresh window, and we can start drawing a nicely dimensioned zone. Click at a starting point, and then waggle your cursor around. Youll see that it gets stuck on axis orthogonal to the grid, and also that there is a number midway along the bottom edge. This number is the current length of the wall. Youll also see that at the top of the screen there is a series of three boxes with text that is changing as you move your mouse. If you type a number, the highlighted text will be replaced by that number, press [tab] and that axis will be locked. Type in the amount you want to move in the other axis, and press enter or click and the wall segment will be created.
dX

Once you have drawn your 4th point, there will still be two red walls following your cursor. You must avoid the temptation to click on the rst point to close the shape. This will produce a zero length section, and wont close the zone. You need to right click and then click escape.

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Clicking the red rulers on the right hand side will switch to polar coordinates, but the technique is still the same.
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Flick to visualise to have a look. Check that the window really is a hole in the wall, not just a shape on the wall.

Placing a window This will tell Ecotect that you have nished drawing the zone, and that you are ready to name it. There is only so much you can do with a building that has no windows, lets put in a window, then we can start to look at what it does. Windows are easy to thing of as a thing, but really they are a not thing. They are the absence of wall in the middle of some other

Enter name for new zone:

zone1

It takes a lot of time to construct windows careful, so if you just want to put in some windows quickly, or you know exactly where the window is going to go, you can select the wall and press the [insert] key.

You can grab the sun (the orange blob) and drag it around the sun path and see the shadow updating. This looks trivial now, but if you had a nontrivial model, this kind of quick, hands on shadow feedback is invaluable. One of the most compelling images is a composite of a whole days shadows overlaid. As the shadows are transparent, they get darker where they land multiple times. This allows you to quickly see areas that are in shadow a lot.

insolation, then it will go a bit browner, and if it gets a high degree of insolation, then it will go a very unpleasant red colour. This mapping of colour to insolation level is what we use in an insolation study, except we use a blue to yellow scale, not a pink to red scale. To show the analysis grid, go to the analysis grid tab and click Display Analysis Grid button. This will bring up a rectangular, blue grid in the middle of the base grid, 600mm o the ground plane. It will currently have no relationship at all to your model.

Enter some dimensions, and then click OK. You can select several faces at once to punch windows at high speed. Now you have a few windows in your shed There are also tools to make animations, and they will be covered later on. If you really need to know precisely where the shadows go, you can do a metale grab from the 3d model window. The resulting data is a bit messy, but with a bit of smart tidying in Illustrator or Inkscape, it can be transferred to a drawing. Have a good play about to discover the potential of these tools. You need to select the oor of the shed, remember, if you get a wall, hit [space]. Once you have the boundary surface selected, click Auto-Fit Grid to Objects, again in the Analysis Grid tab, but a but further down, and the Dialogue below will pop up.

Shadow analysis
Onto the bit youve all been waiting for, some kind of feedback on your little shed. Before we can do anything, we need to site the shed somewhere in the world. Click the world in the top right, then click load weather le, this will bring up a list of .wea les for places that you can test this building. Pick one that you like, and lets get going.

Solar analysis part 1 - Grid Analysis

Showing shadows is old hat to anyone who did technical drawing at school (very very fast old hat, so maybe Michael Schumakers helmet from 1995, but old hat all the same) but this section does something that probably couldnt be done by mortals with pencils and slide rules. The simplest and most useful solar analysis we can do is the cumulative insolation analysis. This name is a bit of a mouthful, but if we break it down cumulative Added up over time insolation How much solar energy falls on the spot

shadow settings Open the tab. Tick daily sun path, and click the display shadows button. This will show the shadows, and shows the sun path for that particular day.

analysis looking into So a good analogy is to take a pale skinned celt like me and stick him out into bright sunlight. Areas of my skin that dont receive much solar energy will stay their usual greyish-pink shade, if some of my skin receives a bit more

You can spend a bit of time playing about with these settings to see how they aect things, but in general they are just ne by default. Click ok and the grid should change and look like the one below.

be needed at dierent times, so it require a wider band of usable times.

You can drag the from marker past the to marker to make the range wrap over then ends.

per grid square, so you are going to wait a long time to see the results of this one! The best thing to do is to do the calcs on the absolute minimum resolution (surface sampling = 1, Sky Subdivision 15 x 15), and then when you are happy that your results are in the right ballpark, increase the resolution a little. The law of diminishing returns that you wont get much of an increase in accuracy for quite a signicant increase in calculation time. The law of inexpert analysis states garbage in - garbage out so there is no point in really high quality analysis if you arent totally sure about your input parameters. Choose surface sampling = 1 and Sky Subdivision 15 x 15 and click next>>. 8. This last screen is a summary of everything you have put in so far. When you are an Ecotect ninja, you can skip the wizard, and jump straight to this page (I still use the wizard, it supports the wizard union, and I have an anity with their beards)

Roll all the way down to the bottom of the Grid Analysis tab, to the Calculations section. The One we want to do is the Insolation Levels calc. This will take us to a handy wizard that will walk us through the process of setting the boundaries for the calculation.

4. Chose Cumulative Values and click next>>. This will show the long exposure photograph view that we are interested in. The other option that is particularly interesting is the Peak Values calc. This allows us to see where hot spots occur. 5. Chose Analysis Grid and click next>>. This option will only be available if the grid is shown. 6. Chose Perform Detailed Shading Calculations and click next>>. This is the only option available the rst time you run the calc, but in future runs it is possible to save time by precalculating the shading, but for the moment, recalculate it each time as there is potential for introducing mistakes here. 7. This is the rst time that we come up against the issue of granularity.

Click OK and watch the reworks!

Wh 480000+ 441000 402000 363000 324000 285000 246000 207000 168000 129000 90000

The st page is asking us what sort of calc wed like to perform. This isnt the only way to get to this wizard, so there are some options in here that arent relevant to us. There are 8 steps. 1. Chose incident solar radiation and click next>>. This is the radiation that falls on a surface, the other calcs are explained under their headings. 2. Chose For Specied period and click next>>. This allows us to see how the space performs over time. It gives us the aggregate information that we cant see instantaneously. 3. Pick the date and time boundaries that your space will be used for. Think carefully about this, as you might nd Periods of time that the space will never be used, and therefore performance is irrelevant, for instance, a school during the summer holiday. However the use of the space may evolve to

The tempting thing to do is to whack the subdivisions up to their absolute maximum to nd to get a really high quality result, but cool your boots, take a look at this table.
Sky subdivision Grid subdivisions
(surface sampling)

In line with the law of inexpert analysis, (garbage in - garbage out) its important not to ever show anyone the numbers on your analysis grids. The mantra of using Ecotect for design is:

Lowest
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Medium
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2 x 2

Num divs 144 1 25 100 625 144 3600 360000

225000000

Comparative analysis, not quantitative analysis

Youll be just ne as long as you remember that. What it means is that its not about making a solution be 10 better than another solution, but making a solution that just is better. You can leave how much better to your environmental engineer. So, how do we go about this? Its not as simple as it sounds, there are two key steps.

324 324 8100 810000

506250000

1296 1296 32400 3240000

2025000000

2700 2700 67500 6750000

4218750000

8100 8100 202500 20250000

12656250000

Low - 1 Medium 5 x5 High - 10 x 10 Full - 25 x 25

That last number really is 12.7 billion calculations, and thats

9. Take the numbers o the scale! People viewing the images will get xated by the numbers, and what they mean (you might as well put runic inscriptions on there for all most people know about what watt hours are). 10. Lock the scales. Its all very well having heaps of images of dierent options, but Ecotect tries to be helpful and it recalibrates the colour scales for every calculation unless you tell it explicitly not to. The rst one is easy, just go into your vector program (Inkscape or Illustrator), and delete the numbers. Done. The second is a bit trickier. The lock icon in the data and scale box locks the scale on the legend. You wont know where to lock the scales until youve run a couple of iterations, so keep an eye on the range, and then set it accordingly.

[ ]) Take a took at the plan view (press [F5]) shadow range diagram. Shadow Analysis tab and You can get to this by going to the clicking the Show Shadow Range button. This will show us if the buildings really do overshadow our shed (make sure that they do). As we are making some new geometry, we ought to make a new zone to keep it in, thatll keep our model nice and tidy. Zone Management tab, and Go to the click on the little plus (+) in a box. This will create a new zone.
Enter name for new zone:

Again the issue of granularity comes up. For something like this, 1m tiles are ne, but for a huge surface, this might be way too ne, and vice versa. In the Oset From Surface box, but in 50. This will pop the analysis tiles o the base surface to avoid the problem of two surfaces in the same place. Tick Trim tiles to t object extents, and you are ready to hit OK.

grid

This new zone is going to be just for our new analysis grid, so I like to make it a horrible lurid colour so that we can be sure that things dont sneak onto it by accident. Click on the little colour box next to the zone name and then pick a nasty bright colour. In computer land, surfaces only have one side. This is absurd you say, how can this be? but Im afraid that its true folks. Surfaces were never really supposed to be used in a situation where they were visible from both sides, a bit like a model made from paper that youve written your shopping list on one side, but is still perfect on the other. If you make the model well, there is no way to see the shopping list, but if you leave holes, then you can see inside to the shopping list, and youll be embarrassed. What this strange analogy is trying to say is that its even weirder in computer land. Instead of having embarrassing lists on the back of surfaces, there isnt a back, there is nothing. Computer surfaces are one sided, and therefore, they have a direction. You can see the direction of a surface by going to Display Surface Normals. The arrows point in the direction of the surface normal (normal is the name for this direction) and you can ip the direction of the surface by pressing [ctrl]+[r]. This will make the arrow point in the other direction. You now have a grid ready to do some analysis on! When you are doing the analysis, it will ask you if you want to do it over all objects, just the selected ones, or those on thermal layers. Its nice to have a choice, but lets keep things tight for now. Ecotect zones have a property called thermal this means that its specially tagged for doing thermal analysis, but we dont have to worry about that for ages yet. To us, its just a handy way of saying use this in analysis. That means that Ecotect will test the insolation on the thermal zones, but take into account the shadows from the non-thermal zones. You change the status from thermal to non-thermal and back again by clicking on the red T in Zone Management. Set all the layers except grid to non-thermal, and grid to thermal. Now we need to invoke the weeezard. Go to Calculate Solar Access Analysis and youll get an eery sense of dj vu. This is exactly the same screen as we got last time There are 8 steps. 11. Chose incident solar radiation and click next>>. 12. Chose For Specied period and click next>>. 13. Pick the date and time boundaries that your surface will be tested for. 14. Chose Cumulative Values and click next>>.

the Visualise tab part 2

Explain exporting large images, clipping planes transparency.

Solar Analysis Part 2 - Object Analysis

The above method is great for doing a single space, but often well need to test the insolation on a surface, or in several spaces at once. For this, we need to create new geometry to test. For simple models, we need to subdivide larger planes to get an idea of how the sun behaves over that area. To make a simple example of this, lets measure the insolation on the walls and roof of a new shed. Draw 4 zones as shown below.

Then make the three triangular zones be a bit taller to play the part of surrounding buildings. To do this, select the oor of each one in turn, and then in the Selection Information tab edit the extrusion vector X Axis property. You can use the spinner, or you can just type it in.

To make the arrows go away again, go to Display Model or just press [F9]. Select the roof surface, and check that its normals point to the outside of the shed. Go to Modify Surface Subdivision Rectangular Tiles

15. Chose Only Use Objects on Thermal Zones and click next>>.

Have a look in the le types list to see just how much stu Ecotect can import, and then weep as DGN, DWG nor SKP are not on that list. This isnt such a problem though, we are interested in quite specic things for analysis, so its good that it slows us down a bit. (Honest, just stay with me for the moment as we do some more toy examples.) The easy way to explain it is that some le formats can contain information that Ecotect cant read, so rather than try to read it and be disappointing, Ecotect makes us use a format that we know will work. Select DXF, and then click the Choose File button. There is a DXF le called match.dxf included in the zip le with this document, pick that.

This lter allows you to build and save import lters to quickly import models without needing large amounts of gardening time before it is in an appropriate state. By default the zone assignments are set to <<File>> which means that everything will be put onto a zone named after the imported le. This isnt usually much use, so set the zone to <<Name>>, which will make a new zone with the same name as the layer that the geometry came in on. Click Open as New, and youll see a triumphantly rubbish model of a march standing to attention in the middle of the screen, resplendent in some very fetching pastel colours. The rst thing to do with any imported geometry is to check its normals. Go to Display Surface Normals and itll show the arrows that indicate the direction of the surfaces. Youll see that the normals are all over the place. There is a tool to help with this, its a bit unreliable, but here goes. Select the geometry with the unreliable normals, by using the Select Objects on Zone(s) button.

16. Chose Perform Detailed Shading Calculations and click next>>. If you are doing this a lot, but without changing any geometry, then you can reuse your shading masks, but this is quite a rare occurrence. It only really happens when you are testing the same model for dierent period of the year. 17. Choose surface sampling = 1 and Sky Subdivision 15 x 15 and click next>>. 18. From the summary, Click OK and wait for the reworks!

Importing a model
So far weve been using toy models of at roofed sheds. This is pretty unrealistic as well usually be making much bigger at roofed sheds. Ecotect has really powerful import lters. These can be modied to allow some pretty smart workows, but well talk about that later. For the moment, lets just get some data in from outside. Go to File Import 3D CAD Geometry and another beautiful window will appear.

On the left of the dialogue there is a preview window that lets you spin the model around to check that its the right one. This works blisteringly fast, but dont let it fool you into opening gigantic les, as the Ecotect opening process is much slower than the preview. Below that there are some options for processing the geometry as it comes in. Removing duplicate faces is always a good idea when importing. Usually youll want to tick Auto Merge Triangles too, but there are times, like now where we want to use the meshing of the incoming model as the subdivision for analysis. You can always do the merging later on, so if you want a nder degree of control, then leave it un-ticked, and then selectively merge the faces later. If youve been working in meters, then youll need to scale your model by 1000, not 1 as Ecotect always works in millimetres. The arrow to the right gives you the correct scale factor to apply for whatever units youve been using.

Once you have some geometry to x, go to Modify Surface Functions Unify Normals of Coincident Surfaces to try and push them all into the same orientation. This probably wont be totally successful, so youll need to manually tweak the normals to that they point in the right direction. Doing this with everything turned on will be really confusing, so its best to isolate the Zones that you want to work with one by one and then x them up in a nice clean environment. Select a zone from the list, right click on it, and choose Isolate Selected Zone. Everything else will disappear, and to get it all back, right click again and select Show All Zones. To start ipping faces, click on a face, or drag a box around some faces, and press [ctrl]+[r]. This process is tedious, but essential to getting a good result. Go to Calculate Solar Access Analysis and run the analysis that must be getting pretty comfortable by now. The odd banding comes from having normals pointing in the wrong direction, as does the odd shaft of light from the back of the sphere. Importing is still a bit clunky, but is far preferable to creating the geometry inside Ecotect.

The right hand side lists the layers in the incoming model. These can be assigned to a particular zone in Ecotect, and materials assigned to them.

Shading design
One of the main reasons that people pick up Ecotect in the rst place is that they want to be able to test some sort of solar shading strategy.

There are a few automatic tools that will design a sunshade for you, but there is really no substitute for a bit of thinking about the problem. All the techniques weve covered so far are ways of nding out where is a good place to put a window, or testing to see if a building can shade itself. So without sounding like a stuck record, if you can make a shading device unnecessary, then thats great! Sometimes a sunshade is unavoidable, so there are a few methods of making sure that its a good one. The question of good is the interesting bit though. The most obvious answer is that a good sunshade will completely block the sun from hitting the window, but sometimes some sun will be desirable, for example allowing low angle (altitude) winter sun in to warm up the building, while blocking high angle (altitude) summer sun. Then there are view considerations, and space issues, etc. etc. so it really isnt a simple problem! Well design a shade for a north facing window (southern hemisphere) on another shed zone, so draw a zone, and use the [insert] key to put in a window on the northern face. The rst thing to check is the area that the sun is coming from. This will allow us to think up an appropriate strategy for stopping it. We need to make a mega shade, one that can guarantee that itll block out the sun. We are going to spray sun rays back from the window to the sun, and we need something for them to hit so we can see them. We arent going to actually build this shade, so dont be at all precious about it. plane. To get the shade to be at the top The shade will be a of the window just snap the rst vertex of the shade to one of the windows vertices, from then on Ecotect will assume that you want to draw all the rest of the planes vertices at that height.

I would spend ages explaining what this does here, but itll be much easier for you to just do it, and then once youve nished gasping and cooing at just how pretty it is, I can explain then. Click next>>>

Some coloured dots will appear on the shade something like this.

As we are striving for gold star standard analysis, you will of course already have an object to test, but Ecotect is very forgiving, so it gives you a chance to atone for your sins and go back and select that window that you forgot to select in excitement about the ). weeezard (and who doesnt get excited about weeezards To qualify for this once in a lifetime chance for redemption, simply click the Select Objects or Set Date/Time (press F2 to return) >>> button, select the window, and then press [F2], simple really. Click next>>>

Now take a few moments to gasp at the beauty of this image Ok, and were back and wondering what this all means. The process is called reverse ray tracing, so what that means is that it casts a ray from the window to the sun, and if it intersects anything, then it leaves a trace on the last thing that it hit before it makes its last bid for freedom. That confused me writing it, so it probably confused you reading it.

Weve come across this before, so pick a date and time range, and lets keep this rolling. Next>>>

Finish o the Plane on the other top vertex of the window and escape from the tool. To spray the solar rays, go to Calculate Shading Design Wizard There are four options to chose from, and for the moment were going to pick the last. Dont worry too much about this, youll nearly always want to project onto Visible Planar Objects. Next>>>

The easy way to think about it is that the rays come from the sun, and then they stop on the rst thing that they hit, but they only go to the window.

Area that is shaded by the tower

So when you are happy, lets go!

Whichever way you think about it, the dots that are on the shade show you the amount of sun that the shade intercepts. By double clicking on the shade, its vertices6 become active, and you can move them about. This allows you to move them to surround the points on the shade, safe in the knowledge that the sun wont get in through your window. This still leaves the shade absurdly big though. One nice property of solar rays is that they are essentially parallel by the time they get to earth7. This means that if we were to be in the sun (as Steve McQueen is in the above image) ge) then we would be able to see only bits of the he earth that the sun could shine directly onto. . This seems obvious, but Ecotect lets us try this for ourselves. Go to the solar tab Sun Path. and click View From Sun Pos and tick Daily

The important part to this question rests largely on what stage you are at in the design process, and what you want to use the results for. As this tutorial is about solar analysis, Ill skip over articial light, acoustic, thermal etc. analysis, and just run through a hypothetical solar prob As I said earlier, granularity matters, as do a couple of other points. To summarise for those keen students that have skipped ahead and missed the stimulating part on how to do analysis: 1. Every polygon counts as one polygon, no matter how big it is. 2. Increasing the resolution of the analysis increases the number of calculations, and thus time dramatically. 3. Therefore, many polygons many calculation = not getting your analysis done on time. The biggest source of trouble is cosmetic detailing, those lovely door handles, and detailed oven knobs that look so good in the renderings. As you can see in this wonderful gas tank (isnt the internet a wonderful place) the mesh density increases in areas with more curvature. This will totally kill Ecotect, so if there are a few of these stacked somewhere unseen in your model, then you are in for big trouble. Keep this in mind, well come back to it in a moment. Imagine for a moment that you are wearing a dark blue pin striped suit, and you are sitting in a luxurious oce with your feet on the table, a bottle of good scotch (or insert whatever kind of expensive booze youd like here - but please - none of that commercial stu, this is a classy fantasy) in your desk draw, and the best looking secretary outside the door, guarding the gate to your creative sanctum. (Again, feel free to tailor the details of the secretary to your desires, remember that we are in your imagination, so you might as well put some eort in.) Right, now we have created the seed of an idea, lets make it do some work. Walk over to the balcony and look over the rail. Its a long way down, but dont let your delusions of grandeur fool you into thinking you can y, hold on tight. Below you there are 60 stories of identical apartments, each one pumping money into Abaddon Developments accounts, and indirectly into your speedboat in Monaco fund. Youve just read about the governments new tax break for environmentally conscious buildings, and you want a piece of that cake. You do some quick sketches on the back of a cigarette packet, its never had cigarettes in it - Philip Morris just sells them in bulk as sketch books now that nobody smokes, and work out the number of vertices in the ecotect model that youll need

to build to prove to the government that they should give you a wad of cold hard ca$h. It turns out that as Abaddons agship tower (this one) looms over the surrounding bungalows like a ve year old with a magnifying glass might loom over an ant, so at no point is the building ever over shadowed by its neighbours.

If a at surface isnt overshadowed, then every point on it will receive equal insolation
i.e. if you have a square tower in a suburb then the windows on each side will behave identically (if you ignore the ones at ground level that might be over shadowed by trees etc.) So instead of needing a vertex at every windows corner, you can just use one at each building corner to get a rough idea of each faces insolation level. The stupid man from the council seems to think that this isnt enough of an inducement to convince him to hand over the briefcase, so you whip out the pad of crisply pressed Marlboro and Virginia Slims packets and smile wryly at the nymph on the printed side of the cardboard page that you then draw a single apartment on.

Unless you look like me, you could stand to loose a few pounds. Lets face it; slightly chubby but cute in the face is no way to go through life. Smoking can help with that You smoke now? Good. Dont quit or the weight will just pile on and youll be helpless to stop it. Helpless. Take care of yourself or you may nd someone who does look like me taking care of your man.

VIRGINA SLIMS
Youve come a long way, baby. Just not as far as me.

SURGEON GENERALS WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide

If we delve a little bit deeper into what is really happening itll help us to understand what the pattern means. For each sample time the computer picks a spot on the window, and shoots a ray to the sun, it then works out how much power is coming down that ray and puts in a spot that corresponds to that amount of power. In our case the time step is once an hour of every hour that we have set in the date and time wizard step, but it is possible to change it on the last page of the wizard. More powerful dots oat above weaker ones, so you can see areas that have strong sun. This allows selective shade design, so we can trim the shade back to enclose just the red, orange & yellow dots and that should give us a pretty good shading device shape.

What to analyse
That sounds like a pretty stupid question The building, duh, but there is a bit more too it than that.

Let me take a moment to explain the sheer genius of this move to the audience (in this case, the audience is you, the real you, not the super slick, imaginary you). As each apartment is identical, and each subdivision of a particular face is identical, then you can safely say that if you (the real you, the slick you would never do this) ran an analysis on a detailed model of all the faades on the building, they would all be identical. So isolating just one will give you just as much

6 7

The singular of vertices is vertex, not verticee. Save face, remember this! The sun is bigger than the earth, so they might even be a little bit converging, but Im not sure what sort of lensing eect the atmosphere might have. The divergence from parallel is so trivial that its really not worth discussing unless you have a few really good bottles of wine.

information in a two hundredth of the time, leaving the slick you time for 18 holes, and the real you, time to go to the supermarket. Now as you are super slick, you wont do this yourself, but youll hand the nymph to a minion, and they will look at you in a puzzled way for a second and then turn it over, gaze in awe at the sketch, and start furiously modelling up an apartment on each of the four sides of the tower. You gently put a hand on top the minions hand, pausing their frantic mouse movements, and you say: Be still just model one and then use the north oset from the project page to control the orientation my child They arent really your child, but it reenforces the structure of power. Now, walk over the drinks cabinet, grab the soda siphon and squirt it in your face. You arent that slick, and youd better remember it. (If your face really is wet, then you might be that slick, in which case, Im very sorry, please dont have me killed) So what this little story is supposed to illustrate is that you can get a lot of feedback from a very simple model, and together with the little burst of revision at the start, you are now equipped with the ability to say:

Site analysis - putting it all together

this stub is still coming

Is there anything that we can take out of this model?

Once you have this reductivist mind set, then you are nearly all the way there to getting good analysis.

Making solar fans for use Microstation

At the early stages of a design when you are just pushing boxes around to test massing there is often a question about overshadowing. The classic way to x this is to do heaps of renders at dierent times of day. This is a real drag, as you can only look at a render from one angle, and takes a really long time to do each one. One very simple solution to this is to make a surface that is the shape of the path of the sun over a given day. We can then use this as a cell in Microstation. If the cells origin is placed at the point that we are concerned about overshadowing, then if our volume pokes through the surface, then it does overshadow, otherwise, we are in the clear.

dX

2700.0

dY

0.0

dZ

0.0

So, thats one, we need to make two more, but rst lets do a bit of gardening so that these are useful when we get them into Microstation. Each fan ought to be on a dierent level/layer/zone, so that we can switch them on and o individually. All we need to do to manage this is to make three zones. Zone Management tab, and Go to the click on the little plus (+) in a box. This will create a new zone, call it WinterSolstice. Put a fan for the winter solstice on it by either selecting the zone and then making the fan, or by selecting a ready made fan, and then clicking the Move Objects to Zone e button. Do the same for Equinox and SummerSolstice.

The Fan will be made for a specic day, so unless you have an odd day set in your brief, it makes sense to do it for the summer and winter solstices, and one of the equinoxes. You can nd these by clicking on the world icon and then just selecting which one youd like to go to, and Ecotect will nd that date for you. To make the solar fan make sure the point is selected (itll go bold)and go to go to Calculate Shading Design Wizard and pick Extrude Objects for Solar Envelope.

Its actually surprisingly easy to make these fans for your exact location. There are only a limited number of weather les for a given country, but in this case the only thing we are interested in is the position on the globe, the weather isnt remotely relevant. On the project page (the top tab on the left hand side) there is a box titled Site Location. You can either type in your latitude and longitude if you already know them, or you can nd them on Google maps. Go back to the 3D Editor, and in a second well place a point to be the origin of the fans. So that we dont need to do any post processing once the fans are made well need to place it at the origin (0,0,0). To do this, click the point icon, and type 0[Tab]0[Tab]0[ enter] and then as if by magic a point will appear at the corner of the grid. Lets go through that a little bit more slowly so that it makes some sense. Click the point icon, and youll see that the X section of the Cartesian coords box will become active. Type 0 ,press [Tab], and the Y section will become active, type 0 ,press [Tab], and the Z section will become active, then type the nal zero, and press [ enter] to commit the command.

Your model should look something like this. To keep things tidy, delete the initial point by selecting it, and just pressing the [Delete] key. The next screen gives options on how to extrude the point. You can extrude it at a single time point, as a fan (the one we want) or at a specic angle to deal with odd legislation. (The UK right to light guidelines use an angled plane regardless of the location or orientation - nutters!) , To export it to somewhere useful, Go to the export manager tab on the right. he I often forget about this and try the usual place of File Export, but this wont be any use to you. ad Click Autocad DXF and then en Export Model el Data.Pick somewhere ve useful to save the fans, and d give them a really useful le name, so something like Melbourne_ FitzroyNorth_SolarFans.dxf, not fans6.dxf or fwafdsa.dxf so that hat they become a reusable resource. . You can then Reference or Xref them into your drawing, safe in the knowledge that you have a useful sketch tool at your disposal.

If you remembered to select the point then youll get a big tick as a reward for being a good analyst, but if you forgot, you wont get the slipper, you can just click the Select Objects or Set Date/Time (press F2 to return) >>> button, and select the point. Click OK, and a beautiful fan will appear.