How to: analyze your first proposal

Forma Site Design, available in the AEC Collection or as a standalone subscription, offers powerful AI-powered tools for architects and designers in pre-design and schematic design phases.

In this article, you’ll learn how to run the sun hours analysis in Forma Site Design. The sun hours analysis provides a visual map of sun exposure. It shows how many hours of direct sunlight your site and building receive on specific dates.

How to run Forma’s sun hours analysis

1. Click the sun icon located at the top of the right panel.
   • The right panel updates to show the sun hours analysis settings.
2. Define the Analysis area, choose between:
   • Site limit to analyze only the defined site boundary.
   • Entire model to analyze all geometry in the model.
3. Select the Analysis dates.
   • The default date is June 21st, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
   • You can change the date using the Date drop-down menu.
   • Click the + icon at the top-right corner to add more dates to analyze.
4. Click the blue Run analysis button.

Reading the results

1. Open the analysis results.
   1. Click the link in the notification box, or
   2. Click the blue button in the right panel when it changes to Open analysis instead of Run analysis.
2. Orbit, pan, and zoom around the model to visually examine the sun exposure map.
3. Review the right panel Highlights and Area breakdown.
4. Adjust the Settings to refine the results view:
   • Toggle between Analysis dates to compare their results.
   • Use the Time interval slider to filter the result to specific hours of the day.

Useful tools

1. Inspect: pick specific points on your building or the ground to see the exact number of direct sun hours this point receives.
2. Legend: filter the results to highlight the areas that fall within a specific range of sun hours.
3. Camera: save a camera angle for later reuse and select one of 2 screenshot export options.
   • Screenshot (PNG) only exportsa visual display of your canvas.
   • Screenshot with graphics (PNG) includes additional data such as the date, selected ranges, and category highlights.

Results accuracy

• The sun hours analysis uses ray tracing technology from NVIDIA’s OptiX™ Ray Tracing Engine.
• All surfaces in the analysis area are divided into measurement points using a Cartesian grid.
• The system checks each measurement point every 6 minutes to determine whether it is in sun or shade.
• These checks accumulate into hourly totals of direct sunlight with reasonable accuracy.
• Small uncovered areas on complex geometry may appear gray in the analysis map.
• Cloud cover and weather conditions are not included in the calculation.

In just a few minutes you gain valuable insight into your proposal. Your next step will be to present your findings in Forma Board!