LEED daylighting analysis directly from Revit

Get the plugin at Autodesk Labs.
NOTE: You must be running Revit 2014 UR2 for this plug-in to work.

Overview

The Revit 2014 Daylighting Analysis (RDA) plug-in uses the Autodesk 360 Rendering cloud service to perform very fast and physically accurate daylighting analyses from within Revit. In this first release of the plug-in, we have enabled it to provide LEED IEQc8.1 2009 results for most models in less than 15 minutes once the analysis is started. For a limited time you can use this absolutely free!

In case you missed the news from earlier this year — Autodesk Rendering is an extremely fast cloud rendering service that also includes illuminance results that are comparable to Radiance with the exception of one aspect — speed. The Autodesk Rendering cloud service accounts for all light bounces and is about 24x faster than Radiance. More details on this valuable service can be found in this blog post.

The Revit 2014 Daylighting Analysis plug-in (RDA) is specifically designed for architects to be able to use without learning the difference between the Perez or CIE's sky models, direct normal incident or direct horizontal radiation. Just specify if you want to analyze the whole building, a single or multiple floors, and kick-off the analysis. If you want more control of those parameters, you can use Revit's existing 360 Rendering Advanced Illuminance feature detailed in this blog post.

The RDA plug-in will help you succeed with your daylighting design challenges as it generates the necessary daylighting simulation results and keeps track of LEED 2009 IEQc8.1 performance during project design.

Results are presented on your Revit elemental model using the Analysis Visualization Framework (AVF) so you can see exactly how daylight is interacting with your Revit model. A room schedule is generated with the necessary results for a LEED submittal. You can also choose to include or not include rooms as LEED regularly occupied spaces and specify automated shades or other details.

For more details on how to best set up a Revit model for daylighting analysis see the instructions on the Building Performance Analysis Certificate site.

 

Getting Started

 

NOTE: You must be running Revit 2014 UR2 for this plug-in to work.

 

The Revit 2014 Daylighting Analysis plug-in is an easy to use and powerful daylighting analysis service that uses Autodesk Rendering cloud service.

 

To setup the RDA plug-in:

 

1. Sign in with your Autodesk ID.
2. Download the plug-in by clicking on the Download Now link at right.
3. Run the installation.
4. Revit will need to be restarted if it is running.

 

To get started using the RDA plug-in:

 

1. Start Revit.
2. Open your model.
3. Go to the Analyze menu and click on the Run Analysis icon in the Light Analysis ribbon.
4. Set what Levels you want analyzed, and click Start Analysis. All Revit Floors on the Levels will be analyzed.
5. Once analysis is completed, click the Generate Results icon in the Light Analysis ribbon.
6. The false color mapping will show up in the current view of your Revit model for the Levels analyzed.
7. A room schedule with the daylighting results for your LEED submittal will be generated and located in the Schedules/Quantities group in your Revit Project Browser.

 

Be sure to check out the tips and instructions for setting up a good daylighting model in the 360 Rendering Help sections.

 

Comments

[David]

A word about Climate and Location from David

The Labs installer download is restricted to certain regions for this first Labs release. However, once you get the plugin installed, the analysis itself should run on a Revit model with a 'Location' in any country where there is weather data available. This should include everywhere, as most of the world is covered by a 16 km grid of climate data locations, though some extreme regions or latitudes may not have a station as close.

To check your weather station, go to Manage > Location and choose a location. If you are logged in to 360, you will bet a map of Green Building Studio Climate Server stations to choose from. If not, a station will be chosen from a default list. Some areas don't have good coverage, but the closest station or a similar location can always be chosen.

Let me know if you have any other problems; we expect there will be some, and we are actively improving these features in response to user comments like yours.

[Justin]

I tried using this plug-in but am having some issues:
1. When running the analysis, I don't have an options to choose which floors to analyze. Is there a way to do that?
2. I can't change the day/time of the analysis. Is this possible?
3. The analysis results only show in LUX and I can't change it to FC from the Analysis Display Settings.
4. In the LEED 3D view, when I crop my view using the section box, the analysis results won't crop so I can't isolate a level to view individually.

Any help with these issues would be much appreciated.

[David]

Hello Justin. Here are some answers for you:

1. We locked this version to only one choice of all floors because the analysis is free for now and it doesn't take much longer to analyze the whole building than it does to analyze just a single floor. We plan to activate that dropdown in the future.

2. The tool currently only analyzes the date per the requirements for LEED 2009 IEQc8.1, which is June 21 at 3pm (and 9am in a future release). If you want generate a analysis image rendering for another time, date or sky setting, you can use the advanced Illuminance feature of 360 Rendering as described in this blog post:http://autodesk.typepad.com/bpa/2013/11/new-daylighting-analysis-in-the-cloud.html

3. The AVF results are indeed in Lux. We would also like to have them in fc and plan to do that conversion for a future release. For now, know that the conversion between lux and fc is about 10:1 (actually 10.763910417:1), so it's a pretty easy conversion to make in your head. You'll notice that the default scale for the AVF has values that equate to 10 fc and 500 fc.

4. The AVF results do not crop, that is correct. The best way to do it is to use an orthographic camera in plan view with the camera below the ceiling and the target below the floor. Instructions for doing this, and for other settings to make a good daylighting model, are in this help location on the BPAC site: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/buildings/revit-illuminance-simulations

Hope that helps!