Autodesk Forma Team
What if you could predict and perfect the living conditions of your architectural designs during the initial stages?
Understanding the impact of your design proposals on the quality of life of your users is of utmost importance. Success and satisfaction do not end with client approval, in fact, they extend throughout the lifespan of the buildings and become profound when the spaces you create are lived in and loved. As we design with these principles, the question arises: where should we focus our efforts for the best outcomes, and what solutions should we employ?
The ideal time to evaluate design impact is during the pre-design phase or schematic design phase, when improvements can be made with minimal cost and time implications. Autodesk Forma’s predictive analysis features can be a valuable tool, helping architects evaluate designs during initial stages for essential living qualities, such as daylight, noise, wind, microclimate etc. Evaluations also need to be performed concurrently, considering the need to balance various qualities. Forma’s comprehensive toolset is equipped to facilitate this, enabling the visual comparison of various proposals for different qualities. Thus, Forma empowers you to zero in on the design that most effectively meets your desired outcomes.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled a comprehensive, step-by-step workflow that you can utilize in Forma to evaluate and compare your design’s performance for your desired qualities.
Step 1: Design the buildings or models you want to evaluate
The first step is to build the model that you want to evaluate. You can create a model within Forma in three ways. This includes using Forma’s native design tool, importing models from other design software in .IFC or.OBJ formats or using Forma’s add-ins to pull your own existing Revit or Rhino models.
Once your project is established in Forma and your proposals are either drawn up or imported, you’re ready to begin.
Step 2: Define the areas of the model that needs to be analyzed
The next step would be selecting the analysis you’d like to trigger. With Forma, you can choose from an array of analyses tools meant to assess qualities like sun hours, wind, microclimate, daylight, noise, solar energy and embodied carbon.
Once you have your analyses chosen, you can go ahead and define the area of the site or model that needs to be assessed. In some analyses, such as the sun hours, the entire site limit gets selected as the default area to be studied. You can modify this if required by drawing a zone that defines a new area. Other analyses, such as wind, noise and microclimate, are all defined by a custom circle that can be adjusted based on the size of your model.
Step 3: Configure and trigger the selected analysis
For a few analyses in Forma, you might have to define some additional parameters before you can trigger them. For example, for the sun hours study you’ll have to input the specific dates for which you’d want to carry out the analysis. As for the noise analysis, you’ll need to input traffic data to inform the analysis before it runs.
Once you have everything ready, you can hit the “Run analysis” button and trigger the chosen analysis.
Step 4: Assess the analysis results
Once the analysis is ready, you’ll be notified, and you can view the results in a separate view mode. You’ll also be able to see a legend that breaks down how you can interpret the different elements and colors that are displayed as part of the results. You may also be able to see more in-depth statistics, graphs and data on the right panel, depending on the analysis you run.
Step 5: Compare different design proposals and qualities
Accessible via the four-square icon on the left panel, Forma’s Compare tool allows you to develop a more comprehensive understanding of your designs and their impact. Its flexibility enables you to view various analyses of Forma side-by-side for a single proposal. Additionally, if you’re evaluating multiple proposals, the Compare tool also enables you to view results for all of them using the same analysis criteria, facilitating a comparative assessment between the designs and their interaction with the site’s qualities.
This straightforward workflow in Autodesk Forma can thus effectively guide your design direction by equipping you with all the necessary tools to assess, compare and optimize your design proposals for living qualities.
Autodesk Forma is available both as part of the AEC Collection or as a standalone subscription. Get started with Forma’s analyses now.
Find out more about Autodesk Forma here.