Hi, I’m Michael Kirschner, I’ll be interning at Autodesk’s Conceptual Design Group for the month of January. Specifically I will be working with Dynamo, a visual programming language(more info here) within the Revit context. I’m going to be posting different projects to this blog as I work throughout the month.
My primary project while at Autodesk will be to create a workflow for iterating and evaluating a Revit model using the daylight rendering as a service. My basic goal is to update a series of parameters on a Revit model, calculate the daylighting on the updated model, evaluate the model based on some criteria, and repeat until the analysis reaches some goal state.
I am going to be using Dynamo graphs to do this. If you haven’t heard of rendering as a service before, the idea is to upload a rendering job to Autodesk, when the job is finished it will be returned to your machine. I linked some documentation below on how to use it from the Revit User Interface.
We won’t be calling these services manually, instead we’re going to use dynamo to call them for us many times on our changing models, and then to analyze the results. Below is an image of dynamo running alongside a Revit window. You can see the daylight render on the left, and some data points pulled into a Revit window and displayed there.
In order to complete this main project there are a bunch of smaller components I’ll need to work through first. There are also many ways to evaluate and optimize a model, so I’ll be looking at different methods for those too once we lay the ground work for updating Revit family parameters and using the daylighting rendering service from Dynamo.
This list is likely to change but my initial project workflow is as follows:
- Changing a parameter on a family instance and saving an image capture of the updated model.
- Iterating a parameter and taking an image of the updated model each time it is changed.
- Iterating multiple families to multiple values, and taking images of all the intermediate steps.
- Learning about the RaaS(Rendering as a Service) dynamo connection – uploading a new rendering job to the cloud.
- Parsing daylighting information from the finished cloud render
- Brute forcing optimization methods
- Hill climbing optimization methods
Resources:
http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/buildings/revit-illuminance-simulations