I have been waiting for this tool for a while and some documentation/information about it... It has been within Ecotect for a long time but now you can use it directly inside Revit. Thanks to The Revit Clinic for the post.
Creating an Analysis Display Style in Revit 2011
Using the recently released Solar Radiation Technology Preview, we can create or modify an analysis display style. Additional documentation is also available in the video here.
By default, the solar radiation add-in will create an analysis display style calledSolar Radiation Default. You can access the menu under the view Properties >Analysis Display Style. Once in the menu there are 3 tabs to modify the display style settings or create a new style; Settings, Color & Legend.
Let’s look at the Settings tab first:
The only option here is if you would like to see or hide gridlines in the analysis view:
Wow... this is my 200th post, I have 70 followers, over 400 RSS subscribers, and the blog has exceeded 100,000 hits! WOOHOO. Thank you to all my readers. I cannot believe how fast this blog has grown. I guess there was a void somewhere that I filled and I am so very grateful to be able to share my passions with you all.
Well I wanted to share with you a few new videos from DesignReform.net:
The Solar Radiation Technology videos are a great expansion of my post.
Thanks again for coming back every day to read, learn, and discuss all things Revit, BIM, Architecture, and Sustainability.
Stayed tuned for so much more... The mid-summer blues are starting and I haven't had a Design class in a few semesters. Needless to say, I cannot wait to start school. Weird, huh?
"Designing for sustainability requires many analyses, and an understanding of the incident solar radiation on a building façade is one of those analyses. It is particularly compelling to be able to do this analysis from within Revit. The new Solar Radiation Technology Preview allows users to study incident solar radiation on a building form within the conceptual massing environment available to all Revit Architecture and Revit MEP users. There are many examples of how the information can be used, but some of the common ones are:
Studying how incident solar radiation on the façade of a specific form differs by orientation. This could be as simple as analyzing a basic rectangular form. It is easy but important to look at incident solar radiation on pitched roofs to understand the impact of various roof pitches and nearby shading elements early in the design process if solar panels are being considered.
To understand the relative importance of glazing for daylighting and solar heat gain of the building, it is useful to quantify the difference between the incident solar radiation that occurs on the lower floors vs. the higher floors of a tall building. This is especially significant in an urban context. Studying incident solar energy is one step towards understanding what types of glass might be appropriate different façades or floors. If the solar radiation on the north façade or lower floors is much lower than the flux on the southern or high floors, varying glass type and performance by face may be appropriate.
Much of the analysis associated with low carbon building design and sustainability is very numerical and not visually compelling. The solar radiation add-in is a great way to provide visual feedback within the context of a design whether as a means to communicate a design choice, or as part of a presentation.
It is worth repeating here that analyses for sustainability, including solar radiation analysis, should be done very early in the design process, and then repeated as needed when the form and design evolves. This new technology preview is available within the massing environment, which facilitates its early use.
The user chooses a weather file which contains the raw solar data required for the analysis, then chooses a date and time range for the analysis, and finally selects the surfaces to be analyzed.
The user has the ability to set the number of divisions or tiles that a surface gets sectioned into for the analysis, with the associated computation time implications. The results can be displayed as cumulative, peak or average values in user chosen units. The computation time varies depending on the calculation resolution, but examples shown here take approximately 10 seconds for the simplest analysis for the simplest form, to approximately 20 seconds for the more complicated form.
Finally, once the users are satisfied with their analyses, they can choose to publish the results in the form of images or output to a printer."
