10 Easy Steps to Conceptual Energy Analysis

As many of you already know, I’m a big Ecotect Analysis fan. Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure (well, mostly a pleasure) of helping hundreds of designers in the US and parts of Europe use this tool to improve the performance of their buildings. That being said, I’m also the first to admit that the process of creating an efficient BIM that can be used for energy analysis is far from perfect. At times it’s time consuming, and other times, it’s just frustrating. Even after getting the hang of it, the process could certainly be improved.

Well, the good news is that our great friends at Autodesk have been hard at work to improve this process and to lower the barrier to entry to start using analysis on all of your designs. The tool they’ve developed is the Conceptual Energy Analysis plug in and the best news is that it runs right inside of Revit!

I’m sure you’ve already heard of it, and maybe even checked out some of the videos Autodesk has posted on Youtube. But, just to show you how easy it is to start using this great tool, I’ve put together a list of 10 easy steps to jump start your building analysis.

This application makes it a snap to upload a properly formed thermal model to the Autodesk Cloud, making use of the Green Building Studio web service to perform whole building energy analysis but without the pain of submitting it to GBS yourself. The analysis is fast, easy, and turns out some awesome charts and graphics to help validate your design decisions. Get up to the Subscription Center right now and give this tool a whirl!

There you have it. I know I told you there were 10 steps. The 11th pic is not a step — that’s your results! Enjoy them. See, I told you it was easy…

Bonus Tip:

You can use Ecotect with the model the Conceptual Energy Analysis tool builds. Simply click Export and choose gbXML. Import it into Ecotect and you’re ready get down to business with an incredibly clean and well constructed thermal model!

1. Export to gbXML from the Results and Compare dialog.
2. Import the gbXML into Ecotect and perform your analysis with an incredibly clean, efficient, and well constructed thermal model!

Amazing! Thanks, Autodesk.

My Article in the AIA Journal – “What’s Keeping Architects from Embracing Energy Simulation?” Overview

Well, I’m happy to announce that the article I wrote on challenges that architects face while performing energy analysis has been published in the AIA Journal. Pretty cool! It’s actually the first part in a 3 part series and I intend to get some feedback from readers to help guide the next articles so that we can overcome these challenges. Energy simulation isn’t just something that MP&E engineers should be concerned with. According to a recent article in JBIM Magazine, many architects are already performing energy analysis on a good portion of their projects, but based on my experience with firms throughout the west, this doesn’t appear to be the case. With tools like Ecotect, Green Building Studio, IES, eQuest, and new capabilities of Revit, architects have the power of doing some really useful calculations. Check out the article and be sure to leave some comments. I’d love to hear from you!

Underlay Orientation and RCPs with Revit (especially Revit MEP)

Mowing the Revit RCP Lawn

I want to give a shout out to Jeremy Smith from the invaluable Autodesk Revit Clinic blog for a great post on an issue that many users, myself included, have found to be very frustrating. As Jeremy highlights, the answer is actually really easy, but often overlooked. I won’t parrot his post here but to sum it up quickly, here are 2 important take aways:

1. If you have trouble getting a ceiling to appear in an RCP view, even after checking all the usual suspects (ceiling category is on, view range is correct, used the right view template, etc.) check the Underlay Orientation and make sure it is set to Reflected Ceiling Plan.

2. The most important take away is this: While part of the View Properties, for some reason, Underlay Orientation is not controlled by View Templates. This is counterintuitive and is the reason why this issue causes so much frustration. I think we get in the habit of using View Templates to control all aspects of a view, and we expect that when we apply a ‘Ceiling’ template, we expect that it would obviously set the Underlay Orientation to RCP. It doesn’t. Set it to RCP yourself and you’ll be mowing the grass in no time.

P.S. – If you’re baffled by my mowing the grass comment, or just want more details on the Underlay Orientation and RCP issue, just check out Jeremy’s great post at http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/08/where-is-the-ceiling-check-the-underlay-orientation.html

Revit and RPC Archvision Content

This tip is fresh out of the CADsoft Consulting tech support department. I hope it helps out anyone who may be running into the same issue.

Several RPC (Rich Photorealistic Content) files ship with Revit and are a great way to add entourage (trees, shrubs, people, etc.) to liven up your scenes. If you use only the RPCs that come with Revit, you shouldn’t have any trouble rendering out your scene.

However, if you have any additional RPCs, that you have created yourself or purchased from Archvision, you will need to install the Archvision Content Manager and properly configure it so that the plugin can verify that you have licenses for the RPCs you are attempting to use. You can find detailed instructions on how to set this up at

Here are the instructions from the Revit help file:

1. Install and configure the ACM. This utility is available free from http://acm.archvision.com. For instructions, see the ArchVision Content Manager Help (http://acm.archvision.com/help).Now you must specify the location of the ACM so that Revit Architecture can access the additional RPC content.
2. In Revit Architecture, click Options.
3. In the Options dialog, click the Rendering tab.
4. Under ArchVision Content Manager Location, select Local.
5. For Executable Location, specify the location of the ACM executable file (rpcACMapp.exe).By default, Revit Architecture attempts to connect to the ACM using the IP address 127.0.0.1 (the local host) and port 14931. If it cannot connect to the ACM there, it attempts to start the ACM executable that you specify here.
6. Click OK.

Happy rendering!

Revit Families – Endless combinations with nested families and the Family Type parameter

Have you ever created a Revit family that had several nested families in it that you wanted a simple drop down menu to give you the chance to choose which nested family you wanted? Well, here’s a brilliant method for creating powerful nested families that seems to be difficult to find solid documentation on. I’d like to thank Bob for reminding me about this easy to use yet dynamic technique for controlling the visibility of nested families.

Here’s the scenario:

Let’s say you have a family (we’ll refer to this as the parent family) that contains several nested families that are possible options within it. For example, you might have a door family that consists of the frame and the opening, but that has several panel families nested into it. One panel might be a typical flush door panel, another is a panel with glass, another is a panel with louvers, etc.

We want to make it easy for users to insert the door family, then choose the type of panel they want. Now the way I’ve seen this documented the most often is to use the Visibility control tied to a Yes/No parameter that controls whether Panel 1 is visible or not, Panel 2 , Panel 3, etc.

This method works ok, but has some potential problems. You end up inserting all the families into the parent family, then having to align and constrain each one, then you have to set up a bunch of Types in the family that in turn have those Visibility Yes/No parameters set correctly. Still following me? One of the problems we’ve run into is that the user now has to create their own types, or manually run through those parameters and make sure that the panel that they wanted is turned on and all the others are off. If they make a mistake, it’s possible that they have more than one panel turned on and all sorts of craziness can ensue.

Also, if you have quite a few nested family options, this list of parameters can get to be pretty unwieldy and difficult to set correctly.

What would be great is to simply have a dropdown parameter in Element Properties that shows all the nested family options and just lets you pick it, having it swap out the appropriate nested family. Well, with the technique we’ll show here, you can do exactly that.

The Solution – Create a Family Type parameter and use it to drive your family Label

After you’ve created your parent family, load up all the nested families that represent the options you want to have available. It’s important that these families be as identical as possible. They won’t be completely identical, of course, but you should create them from each other, keeping the reference lines in the same place to ensure that when one family gets swapped out for the other, things don’t jump around on you and constraints don’t break.

The next step is to create a new Parameter that is configured as a “Family Type” parameter.

Here I’ve named it “Door Panel Type”. You then need to choose which Category of families you want to be available to that Parameter. We’ve created our panels as Generic Models, so I choose this category.

Note that all families that are assigned to that category will be shown in the drop down for that parameter, so make sure you aren’t cramming too much into one family. For instance, if I also had a bunch of families nested in that represented door hardware – knobs, pulls, etc. and they were assigned to the Generic Model category, our drop down for the panels is going to be really confusing, because you’ll see families for both panels and hardware.

Now here comes the little trick that brings it all together: insert one nested family and position it correctly.

You don’t need to insert all of the nested families and go through the trouble of aligning them and constraining them. All the nested families have to be loaded into the main family, but not inserted. Now select the nested family and go to its Element Properties. At the bottom you’ll see Label. Set this value to use the parameter you created earlier (the Family Type parameter) so that this family instance will be driven by it.

That’s all there is to it! Now, when you change the parameter for Family Type, it will swap out this instance with the appropriate family. Brilliant!

In the example at the top of this post, we’ve got two instances of a nested door family that allows endless combinations. Each side of the door can have unlimited family options. This door has 7 panels for each door, giving us a LOT of possibilities.