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 on the quality of life for people is essential to any project. Is there enough daylight in the apartment living rooms? Are playgrounds shaded in summer heat? Are the bedrooms impacted by traffic noise? The success of a project doesn’t stop at client approval: it’s realized when buildings are lived in and loved.
As we design with our users in mind, how should we focus our efforts effectively to achieve the best results, and what solutions can help us get there?
Ideally, it makes most sense to run environmental analysis during early-stage design, when foundational and often irreversible decisions are made that affect the rest of the design. Here changes are easier, faster and cheaper to make than later in the process when it becomes more detailed.
However, environmental analysis is not easily accessible to architects, requiring specialized teams to run analyses or in-depth technical skills to use niche tools. With deadlines looming, there is often too little time and resources to run detailed analysis which traditionally happens in later phases. At the same time, when considering a multitude of factors in parallel, it’s not always easy to see which trade-offs to make.
This is where Forma Site Design helps architects easily and quickly assess living qualities from day one. Forma’s built-in enviromental analysis lets you assess the impact of your design decisions directly in your massing model. It’s easy and intuitive for everyone to use. Quick analysis results give you the feedback on your design while you’re designing, meaning you don’t have to wait days and even weeks for reports. Clear visuals make normally complicated environmental analysis data easy for everyone to interpret and make decisions, whether it’s your team members or client. And you can quickly compare design options to easily see what’s working and what’s not and decide what to prioritise when making tradeoffs.
To help you get started, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to use the environmental analysis in Forma to improve building performance and work towards your desired outcomes for living 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 chosen your analyses, 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 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.