Autodesk Forma is an initial set of capabilities of the AEC industry cloud for early-stage planning and design. Conceptual design capabilities, predictive analytics, and automations help planning and design teams to make solid foundations for projects.
We tried to use this software to analysis a Testing project located at District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
A building's relationship with the sun is a strong factor impacting its architectural design. Sun orientation and the ability to control it are important when making design decisions. Whether it’s by architecture or other means, the power to harness the sun’s energy and limit its potentially harmful effects can make an enormous difference between a good site and a bad one.
Cold countries may chase the sun for warmth, to place outdoor areas and windows at the exact right place, while warmer climates build to shade from the scorching heat of the high sun. The sun analysis measures the amount of time in sunlight at a given date for points covering the ground and the buildings in a proposal.
Sun hours analysis on the building facade
This analysis considers buildings inside the analysis selection area. These results will be important to understand future living conditions for the building residents.
For example, sun hours on balconies can be a key factor for the pricing of an apartment. Or, if your building potentially hinders access to sun for neighboring buildings, it can be a potential concern and a reason to change the project.
Sun hours analysis on the ground
These results will help us evaluate the quality of outdoor areas, which will influence how much they will actually be used, or meet the regulatory requirements specific to your project location.
The sun hours analysis are typically done for multiple dates throughout the year - often summer and winter solstices and spring and autumnal equinoxes. Add and edit the dates you'd like to analyze sun conditions for using the date pickers in the right panel.
Daylight potential analysis will give us valuable insights into the daylight performance of your buildings, highlighting facade areas with inappropriate levels of light that you might want to fix to improve the quality of your housing.
The analysis results provide a rating (Sky Component score) for areas where larger windows or changes in layout are needed to compensate for less optimal daylight conditions, or areas where it will be difficult or impossible to achieve reasonable daylight conditions.
The daylight potential analysis output is a sky component measure of how much light reaches the facades from the sky shown as a percentage score. For different points on the building, the Sky Component score indicates how much light would shine through a window placed at those points. For the usual use case of daylight on vertical facades, Sky Component is referred to as Vertical Sky Component (VCS).
Daylight conditions are usually regulated by way of the Daylight Factor analysis, using windows and room layouts to compute how much daylight reaches interior spaces for an overcast sky. (Vertical) Sky Component can be used as a predictor for daylight conditions in Daylight Factor.
The detailed solar energy analysis in Forma lets us evaluate the potential of generating electricity using solar energy on our building site.
The tool can help us identify which facades or roofs have the most exposure to sun radiation and allows us to estimate the annual potential electricity production from solar panels.
The solar energy visualized on the 3D model is the annual insolation: the quantity of solar radiation energy received on a surface during an amount of time, expressed in kWh/ m².
Solar panels can capture the solar energy and convert it to electricity. The analysis hides much of the complexity of how solar panel systems work by making some assumptions about the system's type, configuration, and operation. Hence, the numerical results should only be considered as an estimate for a similar system in typical weather conditions during a year.
The Forma wind analysis is a powerful tool for early phase assessment of our site for various effects caused by wind. One unwanted side-effect is uncomfortable outdoor spaces due to high-wind areas, generally denoted as pedestrian comfort. Our wind analysis can be used to identify such problems and analyze the effect of design changes.
In warmer climates, ventilation through the site can help cool down the urban area on warmer days. With the Forma wind analysis and an automatically provided wind rose, we can quickly investigate whether your design allows for airflow through your site.
The wind rose contains information about the probability of the wind coming from a certain direction. We show wind roses based on data from Global Wind Atlas.
The direction is shown relative to the orientation of the compass (North, East, South, West). The frequency of occurrence for a given direction is identified by the size of the corresponding segment. Additionally, the %-probability of the chosen direction is shown in the middle of the rose when you select a direction.
The pedestrian comfort analysis combines the wind flow patterns with the probabilities defined in the wind rose to predict where there will be areas with uncomfortable wind speeds over time.
Under the Comfort-tab in the Wind analysis theme, we can watch the results from the comfort analysis for a given wind rose. The comfort scale used is the Lawson LDDC scale, as recommended by the previously mentioned guidelines. Details about pedestrian comfort and the different scales are available in this article.
The comfort scale is shown on the right, indicating where it is most likely comfortable for different levels of activity over longer periods of time.
