From the Insight 360 blog...
By Stephanie Egger
November 18, 2015
Over the past few years, you might have noticed that the Autodesk Building Performance Analysis team has had a fair amount of projects in Autodesk Labs or marked as beta that have been making their way into Revit or FormIt 360 Pro. You also probably noticed that while the portfolio of BPA tools was growing, it sometimes seemed like a lot of separate pieces. Well, today we are absolutely thrilled to announce the release of Insight 360, an effective and cohesive guide for improving building energy and environmental performance.
Insight 360 empowers architects and integrated teams with centralized access to performance data and advanced analysis engines. Through robust integration with Revit and FormIt 360 and direct access to guidance and recommendations from trusted simulation engines and industry benchmarks, architects can approach the design process with understanding of the elements that lead to better building performance outcomes throughout the building lifecycle. Insight 360 integrates many of the workflows available today such as energy cost range, lighting analysis, solar analysis, and EnergyPlus Cloud as well as expanding upon the current capabilities of these tools to provide a holistic approach to building performance.
Energy Cost Range and Performance Factors
Get access to building performance when it matters most—during the design process! You can access the Insight 360 from Revit or FormIt 360 Pro and instantly reveal a range of potential design outcomes through the Energy Cost Range factors. These factors help you quickly identify key energy performance drivers such as lighting power density, HVAC systems, or glazing properties. For those of you who have previously used the Energy Cost Range, you’ll notice that Insight 360 features two exciting new factors that expand understanding of overall performance; window-wall ratio and photovoltaic energy generation.
Quickly Compare Design Scenarios
As you specify the factor ranges for your design scenarios, you can easily measure performance against Architecture 2030 and ASHRAE 90.1 benchmarks, making early targeting and feasibility seamless. With millions of potential design scenarios at your fingertips, visualizing the impact of orientation, envelope, WWR, lighting equipment, schedules, HVAC, and even PV has never been easier. Insight 360 allows you to save and compare your design scenarios to track performance spanning the building lifecycle in a consistent and cohesive manner. Share your insights with project stakeholders and access all your outcomes anywhere.
Heating and Cooling Loads – with EnergyPlus
Yes, you read that right. Insight 360 is harnessing the power of EnergyPlus Cloud to deliver dynamic thermal heating and cooling loads for models created in Revit and FormIt 360 Pro. Generate tabular reports from Revit, or visualize heating and cooling loads in the Insight 360 web interface to instantly call attention to spaces that will be susceptible to higher loads.
Solar Radiation & Photovoltaic Energy Production
Solar Analysis for Revit has been in Labs for the past year, and upon its graduation it is now part of Insight 360. Allowing you to visualize solar radiation on mass or building element surfaces in Revit, solar analysis now includes an automated workflow for understanding PV energy production and value added. New settings such as panel type, percent coverage, and payback period make it easy to communicate performance expectations and feed this information back to the Energy Cost Range. PV energy production is accessible in Revit as well as through the Insight 360 web interface.
Customizable Daylighting Results & Automated Documentation
Lighting Analysis for Revit has also been integrated into the Insight 360 Revit plugin. In addition to being able to perform LEED lighting analysis, you also now fully customize your lighting analysis settings as we announced last month. This means selecting any date and time, specifying your analysis plane, and a threshold. You can also generate illuminance renderings that include electric lighting with greater ease. A schedule is also automatically generated with the in canvas visualization, so you can dive into your results and use them for documentation purposes.
Availability
Insight 360 is available starting today. If you have access to a Revit subscription or FormIt 360 Pro, you have access to Insight 360. It’s that easy. As a subscription benefit of Revit, you can get the plugin from the Downloads page at insight360.autodesk.com. With FormIt 360 Pro, no downloads are needed. Just select the Energy Cost icon to generate or access your insights.
In Summary…
So what does all this mean? Perhaps most importantly it demonstrates our commitment to continue to provide you with tools that can reduce the impact buildings have on the environment. Secondly, with Insight 360 we want to make sure the right people get the right information at the right time. Whether you’re an architect, engineer, owner, or any stakeholder of building energy and environmental performance, we created Insight 360 to help you understand the impact of your decisions and clearly communicate performance expectations throughout the building lifecycle.
This week we’re in Washington DC for Greenbuild telling everyone we can about Insight 360 and after that we’ll be at Autodesk University for some more demos, classes, and conversations. And we’ll keep going after that. Insight 360 is going to keep growing and adapting because we here on the Insight 360 team are committed to a better built environment. It’s that simple.
Stay tuned for more posts diving into Insight 360’s capabilities over the next few weeks. Let us know what you think—in the comments here or at the Insight 360 Community Forum. We can’t wait for you to try out Insight 360 out!
There's more information available on the Insight 360 blog.
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