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Autodesk provides tools that can help you analyze your building’s performance at all stages of the design process. These tools can help you to understand the factors that impact the building’s performance in order to make informed decisions about your design.
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Insight Energy Optimization
Insight is an analysis tool that provides information about your building’s projected energy use and the energy costs associated with meeting that demand. Insight includes two tools focused on Energy Optimization:
- Insight’s Generate tool creates an energy analytical model for your design and submits that model to the Insight cloud service, where a wide variety of design options and alternatives are generated and evaluated to report a range of potential performance outcomes.
- Insight’s Optimize tool provides access to the results of the analysis in the Insight web interface, which allows you to explore and change key design factors and see the impact of these choices on the overall building performance.
You can find more information about how to use Insight’s Energy Optimization tools here.
Insight Solar
The Insight Solar tool can perform many types of solar analyses on your model. The results of these selected analysis are displayed in the Solar Analysis window, as well as being displayed visually as color gradients on the model surfaces.
While Insight Solar is not intended to be used for sizing PV panels, it can help you identify locations for maximum solar gain by considering the effect of shading and seasonal variation in solar radiation.
Insight Lighting
The Insight Lighting tool allows you to perform lighting analysis studies for your building. You can perform different types of studies including LEED Daylighting and Illuminance.
Insight Heating and Cooling
This Insight Heating and Cooling tool performs an analysis of your design using EnergyPlus to determine the heating and cooling loads. The heating and cooling loads in the baseline model are calculated using EnergyPlus hourly simulation engine for design days.
You can find more information about Heating and Cooling Loads analysis here.
Dive Deeper
Exploring Insight
Once the Insight analysis is complete, you can view the results and explore the opportunities to improve the energy performance of your design in the Insight interface.
Exploring Insight Factors
In Insight, the Factors displayed below the model viewer allow you to easily test the impact of changing the settings associated with key design features on the overall building performance.
Creating an Energy Model
When getting started with building performance analysis, one of the first steps is often to create a conceptual model of your building in Revit or FormIt. This conceptual model can easily be converted into an energy model, which can be analyzed in Insight, as well as to explore design strategies and alternatives for improving the building performance.
Basic workflow with conceptual models
Generate an insight means performing an energy analysis on your model. The basic workflow presented in this video can be applied to all models but you’ll need to adapt and add to it to fit your model complexity and needs.
Workflow for schematic models
Insight can also be used to analyze the building performance of detailed building element models that you’ve created in Revit. These building element models can be created by converting the surfaces of a conceptual mass model, placing new Revit elements, or a combination of both of these methods.
Workflow for detailed models
Previously we used Schematic Types, which applied thermal properties to all wall, roof, window, etc. elements in the Revit model if enabled. Now we’re going to use an approach that pulls the thermal properties from the building elements themselves, instead of applying thermal properties. This approach is called “Detailed Elements,” and it allows you assign unique thermal properties to individual building elements by type in your model.
Comparing Scenarios in Insight
Once the Baseline scenario for your project has been created and saved, you can start exploring the impact of changing other factors to see their effect on the energy performance.
Building Orientation in BIM
Orientation is one of the design factors that should be considered early in the design process because the building’s orientation to the sun has a considerable impact on the building’s heating and cooling loads.
Energy Loads in BIM
Software simulations can help you understand how heating and cooling loads change throughout the year, and what elements of your building’s design contribute the most. Is it excessive solar heat gain in the summer that makes you have to cool the space? Is that same heat gain helpful in cold winter months? What are the tradeoffs?
