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Sustainability Case Studies: Perkins+Will and Johnson Controls

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See how Autodesk sustainability design tools were used for the Architecture 2030 initiative with Perkins+Will, Johnson Controls, and MasterGraphics.aec. The Perkins+Will case study centers around Director of Research John Haymaker’s "Design Space Construction / Sprout Space" project. Discover how Perkins+Will and MasterGraphics.aec used Dynamo Studio, Fractal, FormIt, Revit software, and Insight to meet design, energy (2030), and view quality requirements. Learn how Johnson Controls’s Clay Nesler (VP of global energy and sustainability) and MasterGraphics.aec used FormIt, Revit, and Insight on the JCI Shanghai HQ project, where they compared the accuracy of their existing process using other competing tools to the Insight workflow. In Mr. Nesler’s words, “this is uncanny”—to see not only how close the results were, but also how few hours were used to generate the schematic design, design development, and construction documents models for the comparison, and that a large ROI was discovered.

Key Learnings

  • Learn how 2 companies are utilizing the Autodesk sustainability tools
  • See how Dynamo, FormIt, Revit, and Insight can be best capitalized on for the Architecture 2030 initiative
  • Understand how the Insight sustainability workflow can be used by everyone in the firm, not just a select few, when compared to the competing products
  • Learn how “accuracy” is the new method to determine energy use intensity (EUI) to better design and build sustainable buildings

Speaker

  • Avatar for Jarod Schultz
    Jarod Schultz
    With years of experience, I lead a dynamic team of solution consultants who specialize in crafting innovative, connected data and automated solutions. We work with clients across various industries, such as AECO, manufacturing, and power and process, to provide forward-thinking strategies and solutions that drive business success. I have a strong background in agile methodologies, which underpin our commitment to strategic excellence and continuous improvement. We assess each client's unique needs, conduct comprehensive business value assessments, and define customized solutions that align with their goals and vision. We also manage program execution, oversee implementation planning, and ensure the successful delivery of solutions. Additionally, we support client adoption, monitor its progress, and maintain strong client relationships. We are passionate about creating value for our clients and helping them navigate the complexities of their projects.
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      Transcript

      JAROD SCHULTZ: So I appreciate everybody showing up for today, especially first day of AU. I'm just curious who's the first comers. First AU in here? Wow. Almost over half. OK, well, welcome to AU. This is hopefully going to be a great class for you, kick off really AU. There are two case studies that Autodesk brought me in to work with Perkins & Will and Johnson Controls.

      I'm Jarod Schultz. I'm Director of Research and Development at Master Graphics. You can read through. But really, overarching, I work with innovators, early adopters, look at their workflows, look at how there are lots of disruptive technology these days. I think we would all agree that there's overwhelming technology out there, and trying to adapt to it, and so on.

      So sitting down with them and trying to explain or help them with the whole people, process, and technology, and try to absorb the technology as clean as they can as they go through it. I also deal with software development, either Autodesk apps or even on the Forge platform, at this point. So I kind of got my hands in a little bit of everything.

      What we'll be looking at today, kind of just breaking this apart, is kind of a two-step. And I'll start off with Johnson Controls, first but I'll talk about Perkins & Will here first. So worked with John Haymaker. He's Director of Research Development there at Perkins & Will. And he came up with this process about four years ago. It's called sprout space. It's a portable classroom.

      And I was brought in. They're working with Dynamo, Grasshopper, HoneyBee, Ladybug, Open Studio. And they had a workflow and they wanted to recreate the workflow, but use Autodesk tools instead. So myself and Justin Elliot that works at Master Graphics, we sat down, looked at the workflow, and replicated it using Dynamo, Fractal, Revit, and then all of Autodesk as a sustainability tool. So I'll show you how that all went.

      By the way, I'm with Perkins & Will. I got an agreement with John to be able to hand all this stuff out to you. So you'll have all the Dynamo graphs that we did. This is actually going to be up on the Autodesk Knowledge Network after AU at some point. There's going to be a YouTube videos on that I did with a couple of workshops with Perkins & Will. So you'll have access to all of that stuff, so just a heads up.

      Johnson Controls, this is a really cool project. I got brought in, again, with Autodesk to help with and work with Clay, who is the VP of Sustainability there at Johnson Controls. I don't know if anybody's seen their Shanghai headquarters, but it's a beautiful building. It's got pretty much any sustainability piece to it. And again, they were using other software, other than Autodesk, as sustainability tools.

      And this was more of a validation. Clay wanted me to come in and go and do a schematic design, design development, and CD. Gensler gave me their model, which is full CD construction document model. And I had to backward re-create it, basically, looking at it from a perspective a schematic design, and then we're pushing it into design development, and then finally into CD.

      And then Clay never gave me any hint on what their DOI number was or what the cost per square foot was for energy. I had no clue on that. So I was basically kind of coming in blind, working with their tools, and then I had a presentation with Clay to show our findings, and I'll talk about all that stuff as we go forward.

      So really, you're going to see how two companies, two very large companies, are starting to look at Autodesk sustainability tools and start using them. You're also going to see how Dynamo, FormIt, Revit, Insight, and some of the other sustainability tools come into play. You'll see how the workflow goes. You can start adopting this. You can start using this in your firm tomorrow. And then we'll start looking at how, really, Autodesk's tools dealing with accuracy as we're going through this and the validation behind them.

      So first of all, before I get going here, just overarching question. Who's using or has tried Insight at this point? I'm just curious. Quite a lot of you. That's awesome. What about using Dynamo or Fractal? Good portion of you. Cool. All right. So understand I'm following the case studies. I'm not going to get into the weeds again. I got a large document that goes through this, that does go through a lot of the weeds. And you have all the files in the Dynamo graphs that you can backward engineer.

      Who's part of the 2030 challenge? I'm just curious. A good portion of you, too. OK. So for you, I would hope everybody understands what the challenge is. It really states that any new buildings or developments or major reservations be carbon neutral by 2030. And then they have these incremental benchmarks that they're trying to match. I'm not too sure if everybody knows this, but 73% of the 20 largest AE firms are really responsible for about $100 billion in construction annually. And they've all implemented this 2030 challenge.

      The number, I hope it grows, but approximately 40% of all US architectural firms have only adopted to the 2030 challenge. So hopefully, that number gets a little higher as we go. AIA, of course, has jumped onto this. Is anybody using design data exchange, their tool sets to help fill out the forms and reports? I don't know if everybody knows this-- I hope you know it, but if not, I guess I taught you something already.

      But Insight does talk to the data design exchange. So anything, as for filling out those reports, I know everybody fills out those forms and it's not fun, but it'll automate that process. So if you're not aware of that, that's one of the added bonuses. And Autodesk actually was working with AIA to build that tool, so it was part of the thing.

      And I think everybody in this room knows this. I don't think the general public really understands this. But buildings do take about half of the energy produced in the US. They're also responsible for about 50% of the CO2. So really, at the end of the day, buildings are still one of the biggest polluters.

      But instead of being negative about it, to me, it's one of the huge opportunities for all of us in this room to change that, to make this better. Buildings shouldn't be the number one on there, that list. But hopefully, people get a little bit more educated about really what's all going on there.

      So some of the challenges. So I think energy modeling, at the end of the day, is the critical piece to try to achieve some of these 2030 targets that we have in front of us. Really kind of the sad fact, back in 2005, is 80% of the projects didn't have an energy model. So they pretty much just failed, at that point, on trying to reach that goal. There was only 40% that met that.

      So really, how can we expect to meet these targets or goals? We don't really have these early design decisions on really how the building's impacting. So we need to rethink this a little bit. You'll see some things here about how easy it is to create the energy models within Revit.

      The other thing-- I'm going to sit down at this point. The other thing, dealing with the 2030 challenge, I'm happy to say last year, there was about 400 firms on here. This year, there's about 500 firms on here. So the number just keeps getting more and more, which is great to see. I love coming up to the list and kind of seeing who's on here, and so on. I love how Colorado's represented on here, 4240 and [INAUDIBLE] and a few other ones, to say the least.

      So firms are joining, of course, and jumping on the bandwagon. And the biggest thing, too, is Insight is plugged into this. All it really needs is whatever your email address is and the password, and it can help you then take that information from Insight, bring it over here, and start filling out the forms for you for your projects. So hopefully, if you're not aware of that, please take advantage of that. It's a huge automation piece that I don't think anybody here has fun filling out some of that stuff and trying to stay on top of it.

      Now, if you're new to Insight, which there was still about 50% of you in here that are not aware of it, I just want to make sure that we get all educated about what's going on with Insight. Pretty much any Revit model that you have right now today can create an energy model, and you can see what the performance of your building is today. All you got to do, really, to be honest, at the end of the day, is set a location, make sure true north is the set up, and you're ready to rock and roll.

      Now, I'll go through some best practices, just to make the performance happen faster, but that's a true statement. I don't know if anybody in here uses Autodesk's schematic tool being FormIt, but FormIt can do energy analysis at the very early stage also. And I'll show you some examples that have been validated. Even at an early stage, you can still get some very good numbers from this engine to understand what's going on with your building.

      The other thing I want to mention, and this is a big piece, too, that sometimes people don't realize, the energy modeling and insight is just built into Revit. That started happening in 2017. Some people don't realize, though, that there's a plug-in where we can do also solar variation, which is also built in to FormIt, by the way.

      Daylighting is also part of this, and the heating and cooling, which is all based on energy plus is also built in. So sometimes people don't realize that you have this added bonus, where you can just go up to Autodesk's Insight. It's all free, and you can grab whatever individual plug-in. Whatever version Revit you got, you can download it and plug it and you get those other additional tools.

      With Perkins & Will, I'll go through those other additional tools. Johnson Control wasn't worried about any of that, wasn't part of the workflow. But with Perkins & Will and their workflow, it was part of that, so I'll cover that today as we go through it. So I want to make sure everybody understands, there's also these other tools, and these have all been validated, too.

      EnergyPlus, I don't know if everybody knows that it's from the National Renewable Energy Lab. I'm happy to say they're right in my backyard in Golden, Colorado. I'm from Denver. I know a couple of guys over there that work with Autodesk on some of the stuff that's coming down the pipeline soon. And that a lot of their tool's been validated against Autodesk's tool sets. So again, I can't say it enough, I don't think, about how the validation's sitting here already.

      Now, the other thing I want to mention-- I don't know if anybody knows this particular website. This is kind of actually a really cool website. Ian Malloy, who looks over some of the sustainability tools at Autodesk hooked me up to this. So this number is actually old. This is probably three months old.

      There's 177 different programs out there that do some sort of sustainability analysis. At this point, I think there's almost 195. So there's not like a shortage of tools out there for sustainability. In some cases, maybe there's too many, too confusing sometimes. But just understand that Autodesk has their own set of tools that are basically built into the software that we all use today.

      Who uses Revit every day? Yeah. I mean, we have it right there at our fingertips, we just got to hit the button and start using it. And that's the biggest thing. How is Insight different in all those other tools? And I think the biggest thing that we have to understand is it talks BIM. Our tool talks BIM. It's just built into the tool.

      You're not using some sort of secondary model. We've all played this game. I've played the game of SketchUp and Sefaira. I played that game. It's another model that's not BIM-related. It's not connected to the project. It's separate, whereas Insight is part of Revit. It's part of FormIt. It's not some other separate tool that comes along for the ride.

      So I think that's something that you have to understand is that using some of their other tools-- I love the other tools. HoneyBee, Ladybug, those are great tools. You got to be a pretty skilled person to use some of those tools, to understand, because if you don't, you're going to get yourself in trouble. You'll get numbers that are not good numbers.

      And so a lot of times with talking with law firms, they don't have that specialist on board. They have to hire an outside consultant. It's a separate model. Because sometimes they're hiring an outside consultant, and really, it's only certain projects that they're actually occurring that cost to see what's going on. And again, with using Autodesk's tools, we don't have to necessarily worry about any of that because it's part of our tool set today.

      So it goes from concept to detail. It's all one single model that we've been working with. The architect can use it. The engineer can use it. You can even share this, by the way, through Insight to your client. So if the client wants to peruse that, look at that, that has nothing to do with your stuff, the settings that you've done. But if they want to look at it, they actually have the ability. You can type in their email address and they can actually view it. It's web browsed.

      They can look at it on their tablet, their phone, whatever. They just got to have an internet connection. And again, it's a single model. And you can do it on every project. One of my other client's page, working with Jill out of the Houston office, almost 80% of their projects right now all have sustainability on it. She wants to bring up the other four or five offices that have got 2, level 2.

      So enough of that. I wanted to get into now the case study and kind of talk about this. It's a beautiful building. It's over in China. The workflow or the process behind this was as I was given Ginsburg's model, which was a full CD model, and I had to go back and create an SD model using FormIt. I had to bring that FormIt model into Revit, which is cool because all the materials come along, all the levels come along, And. So on. And I can bring that into Revit. And then based off of that, I can start creating my own design development model from that. And so we'll kind of work through this process.

      Now earlier, I had done-- there's another slide coming up here and we'll talk about this. But if you look at the top right, this is what I had to develop. I got this model from Clay from Gensler, and then I had to kind of backward and re-create it, just to validate the workflow. Now, in the bigger picture, just understand, the other reason why Clay wanted us to do this is not only to validate the numbers and make sure that whatever they come up with is the true numbers, but they also wanted to look at it and say, well, maybe our technical sales staff can grab FormIt.

      When they're working with a stakeholder or an owner, they could very quickly mock up the building. They could create an energy model off of that. They could do analysis of it, and then they could change the ranges, and so on, and say, hey, if you add our sensors to it, this would be the additional savings that you would see. So that's a bigger picture kind of a scope that we're looking at to try to deal with this.

      If you ever google this building, you'll run right into this picture here. I'm not going to go through every nuance of this thing, but if you kind of just start looking at everything that's on here, there's quite a lot of stuff that this has on it. Just some of the expected goals was to generate 44% savings in the overall energy consumption, compared to some of the other local buildings in the market.

      The other thing that they wanted to do is they wanted to reduce water usage by 42%, using some gray water recycling and stormwater, recapture facilities. So that was kind of some of the goals. It's a pretty decent sized building. It's 45,000 square meters. Now, talking for us Americans, that comes to-- do you need something?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] really quick. Sorry. [INAUDIBLE] is down. [? The stream ?] in back is down.

      JAROD SCHULTZ: OK. So for us, what that relates to is about 476,000 square feet. So it's a pretty decent sized building compared to most commercial buildings in the US, which is around 19,000 square feet. The other thing that was interesting about this building is is that it had three certifications on it.

      So we have this IFC World Bank Group, or EDGE, this Excellent and Design for Greater Efficiency. Obviously, a lot of us know the US Green Building, or LEED. And then China has, also, one Green Building design, label three-star certification. So to be honest, a very sustainable building, to say the least.

      Now, back in spring of 2017, when I started working with Autodesk on some different workflows and processes that we're looking at and seeing where we can push the envelope a little bit-- I don't know if anybody recognizes this model. This is a little bit of tongue in cheek here. This is actually a model. Do you ever do the tutorial in Sefaira. It's that model right there.

      So the idea was is I was going to re-create that model using FormIt. So this, up at the top, was three different FormIt models, bringing it down into Revit, and then slapping building elements on it and then continuing on. It's a little bit of tongue in cheek that I did back in 2017 in the spring. On my LinkedIn account, it's got like 4,000 hits, or something or other.

      But it was a little tongue in cheek, FormIt and Revit and Insight equals Bye, Bye SketchUp and Sefaira. It was meant to wake people up, that hey, you have this AEC collection, you're working with Revit, and you have a really good set of tools that everybody in your office could start using. And it was just my way of kind of waking people up a little bit to, hey, you might want to try these things out.

      Sustainability doesn't mean that it's hard, all right. I think that sometimes with some of the existing tools, it's kind of hard to get into the sustainability. Hence, that's why we have so many specialists out there. So what was cool about this is I got to redo this workflow again, but now I'm working on a project with Johnson Control, doing the same thing. I was doing FormIt, bringing it into Revit. As a mass model, all the levels are coming along the ride, all the materials, and so on. And then slapping billing elements on it and then creating a CD model. So I was able to really kind of go back through and just validate this whole situation.

      Now, a couple of things that I want to make sure that everybody is aware of behind the scenes, and I didn't mention this earlier and I wanted to talk about this, was a couple of things about the energy analysis that's doing-- it is using EnergyPlus. And so most of the other tools out there are using EnergyPlus. It does also use the DOT2, or 2.2 engine, so just a heads up.

      When Insight runs, it's actually doing almost 250 runs. But then there's some machine learning and some logarithms that they're doing. So really, it's going through, really, trillions, to be honest, analyzing what's all going on with this. All of this has been, again, validated. This is all using a cloud-based engine called Green Building Studio, which is something that you and all of us can still get to. If you type in gps.com, you can log in and you can look at your project, by the way. And this has all been validated through hash rate 140.

      The daylighting tools is all using a 360 cloud rendering. This has all been validated through radiance and some real world measurements. And the solar radiation's has been done through some [INAUDIBLE] sky model. It's been tested by NREL. Also. And then the heating/cooling, like I said, was EnergyPlus, but it's also actually 140 compliant.

      So when we sat down with Clay, Clay was interested on some of the heating and cooling. And so we went through and we talked about some of the cool spots, hot spots that we were seeing in the model, which, again, started validating some of the information that they were also seeing. And I don't know if everybody is aware where some of these tools are, but let me jump back in and let me show you this a little bit.

      Now, one thing I want to mention is here's the-- if I go ahead and get through the building side. So this is Gensler's original model. One thing I will add is, just to enhance the performance here when it creates the energy model, all the site work, I just turned off the site work. Anybody who's ever done site work in Revit knows that you use floors and floors and some more floors to represent roadways and grassways, and so on. Everybody with me on that?

      So if you have that information in your model, you would create a 3D view and just simply turn that off. The only reason I'm doing that is just to speed up the performance when it creates the energy model so it doesn't have to sit there and analyze that and say, OK, what's going on there?

      Now, this energy model took a little bit. Took about a minute, a minute and a half to produce. But if you've ever sat down and created an energy model with some of the other tools out there, this is a pretty serious model when it comes to energy. I could not imagine someone sitting down and building all those surfaces with some of the other tools out there. Probably take weeks to pull some of this stuff off, which, actually, was part of the validation, also, was just the workflow and the time that was spent.

      So that gives you some hindsight a little bit about what was going on with this particular model, creating the energy analysis. We'll look at some of the other stuff in here, too. But along with it, Clay was also looking at some of the heating and cooling loads. In fact, let me jump back to here for a second and I'll show you the design development model. So if I open up this guy here, you can kind of see a couple of aspects of it. So that was kind of the CD side of it. This was based on the design development model itself.

      And again, if I look at the building and the mass together, you can kind of see how the form and shape was all matched up, and everything was like it would be in reality, if you started this project from scratch, using those tools and going through this particular workflow. And along with this, if you wanted to look at the heating/cooling loads more in a table format, let me just show you where that is. That's under Analyze.

      You just come over here and pick on Heating and Cooling, like it says. It's got EnergyPlus. That's what it's using. It takes a few seconds for it to read the data and put it into a table format, but you can start then looking at the information. Now obviously, you can take this information and put it somewhere else, if you wanted to.

      So that is more of a table format. The thing that Clay was interested, too, though, was is obviously some graphics. And so this is something that I don't think people realize sometimes with Insight is that you have the ability to come up here and pick on heating loads, and you can actually look at that model and you can capture these graphics, also, in however form or fashion that you want. You can also look at the cooling loads.

      You can maximize this view so it's taking up the whole entire screen, if you want. There's a little button there. There's all kinds of cool tools down here to migrate through to the model, if you wanted to. So there's a little project browser in here. So if you want to look at a certain space or a certain room, you can go and do that, if you wanted to. So I just want to make sure that everybody knows that, hey, there's some other mechanisms in here that could maybe also give you some additional information that you could start using and start working with.

      So jumping back, so that was one of the things that he was interested in and he wanted to look at that information to see and make sure that what they were getting was really being the same information that we were getting. So when I started putting this together and started to develop the energy models, and start pushing it up to Insight and let the cloud burn and turn on it, the initial numbers that I was getting at was--

      And by the way, this little button here, and I'll show this to you. You can go jump back and forth between these, if you want, between an EOI number or a square foot per year, as for cost. And sometimes when I'm working with owners or stakeholders, sometimes they appreciate that they can actually see a square feet cost, instead of the EUI. Sometimes they're not too sure exactly what that means at times.

      But this was the original number set. Now again, Clay held his cards pretty close to his chest. I didn't have really any clue what they came up with, as for an EUI number or what their cost was. So looking at the internet, asking Clay a couple of different questions about some of the ways of how certain things were being constructed, I went into and changed some of the tiles, or what they call widgets inside Insight, to what I thought was probably what they chose or what they had done.

      And so my numbers started coming down. So you can see the EUI number literally almost got cut in half. You can see how the cost got almost cut in half as I started working with that and started making those settings more real world to really what the building was going to be. And just to show this to you, and there's a couple of little, I want to make sure, some tips and tricks in here that you guys are aware of.

      When you first bring up your Insight model, one of the first things I always tell people is create what we call a scenario. And I always create a scenario called Default Plus PV. Because one thing that Insight does do, which you can agree or disagree with-- you can turn it off if you don't want it. But it assumes that you're always going to put PV on the building. It just assumes that.

      If you don't want that, you just come down, switch it off. And then just make a scenario and call it Default Minus PV so you can actually, very quickly, understand, oh, well, what is this building doing with PV and what is it doing without? And you can, I mean in seconds, learn that with anything.

      And the scenarios are super easy. All you gotta do is come up here and hit the Plus button. I think everybody can do that. So you hit the Plus button. It creates an untitled scenario, and then you just pick on the little three dots and you rename it, or in this case, someone deleted it. And then you can save those settings.

      So originally, this is what it was, and then I did some general improvements. And down here, you can start looking at the widgets of the different tiles. So there's a bunch of building orientation, the glazing, window to wall ratio, the wall construction itself, roof construction, HVAC, [INAUDIBLE] rotation, plug load efficiency, and so on and so on. And you can kind of start seeing what I was starting to change with.

      Now understand, if I go down here to HVAC, let's talk about this for a little bit. So you've got a range, and this is the biggest thing you guys start thinking about when it comes to Insight, is when you first come in here, it's actually going to look like that. It's going to look at the whole broad range, from low performance to high performance. So what we got to look at here, clear to the left is low performance and clear to the right is high performance.

      And if you pick on this, you can see the different matrix of what's going on with the HV system. If you want to play the range game, what I tell people is take this down to like three columns. And you can say to yourself, well, look. If I move this over to here, this would be a low performing HVAC system. You can see how the numbers are automatically updating as I see that. Or I could say, hey, it's a medium performance. Or I know, for a fact, it's going to be a high performance HVAC system on here. But you can use a range if you wanted to.

      In fact, for me, I wasn't too-- I kind of knew that they were going to just go all out, because of everything else that they were doing with that building, but I played it safe. And I'm like, well, I'm going to go from mid to high performance. And this is one of the things that Clay changed on this, and said, no, we're going to switch this and change this. But this is one of the games that you can start playing around with.

      And the other thing is you're seeing instant feedback. Because of where it's located in China, wall construction's not having a huge performance effect, whereas if this was in Madison, Wisconsin, that might be a different issue. So that's the other thing, you're getting some instant feedback on this.

      So when I was going through this, first of all, when I first proposed this, I was nervous with Clay. I was like, man, I'm probably going to be in the ballpark, but who knows, right? So when I first showed him the original [? fault. ?] He's like, hm. And I'm like, no, no, no. Don't wait. Here's what I came up with.

      And he's like, wow, that is in the ballpark, Jarod. That's getting close. And he's like, well, let's go now, let me look at the numbers here and what you did. So there was HVAC. In fact, if I jump back here, there was a couple of things. There was HVAC, PV, wall construction, and lighting efficiency. There was a couple of things that he changed on that.

      And when we changed those numbers, obviously, we could see those numbers update instantly, as we did it. In fact, let me go back to here and actually turn on what Clay-- so Clay had me go in and change four of those, and this was Clay's results when we did that. And so we saw those numbers instantly update, and that's when he said what he said. He's like, this is uncanny, Jarod.

      He said you're within $0.10 to $0.15 based on the number that we came up with. And then he asked, how many hours have you got into this? I said, about 40 hours. And then he's like, I'm not even telling you how many hours we got into ours. All right. Can anybody fathom, maybe? [INAUDIBLE] 40 hours that they spent. Months? Weeks? Something.

      The biggest thing was, for Clay, huge return on investment. If he starts looking at this as a company and start thinking about some of his technical sales taking advantage of this, he could see some really good results of it. And he trusts the numbers because, hey, we've validated that they spent weeks on doing this, I'm just assuming. But our numbers came in really close.

      So it was a good feeling. It was a great project to work on with Clay. And it kind of validated-- and this is something else. When I did this, back in early 2017, and I saw these numbers and I worked with some of the other tools, I sometimes see a roller coaster ride between some of the numbers as we go from early design, schematic design, over to design development.

      One of the biggest things I saw when I went through this was about a 10% difference. So that was great to see, that I didn't see a roller coaster ride. That was the other thing that Clay wanted to see, too, is Jarod, when you were going through these different models and you were doing this-- now obviously, I could have this all in one model, but understand what my workflow was. I went from FormIt over to Revit, so two separate models at that point. But then once I got into design development and the CD model, we're talking about the same model at that point.

      But if you look at these numbers, these numbers are all, again, within about 10% of each other. So it just, again, validated for myself that, yeah, I could go from an early schematic design to a CD, and this isn't a roller coaster ride with the EUI numbers or the cost per square foot. They're all within about 10% to 15%. So again, it's just validating some of the results with this. So this gives you, hopefully, some good insight about what we're doing with their particular workflow and some of the things that we saw as we went through it.

      Now, with Perkins & Will, this was much more in-depth. This is something that I got brought in really in the fall of 2017. This is a workflow that I still work with John to improve upon. The new version of Fractal, I'm sure anybody that's been sitting in any of the Dynamo stuff has heard about refinery, at this point. That's the next version of Fractal that's coming.

      But the goal of this one was is they were using Grasshopper, Rhino, EnergyPlus, Ladybug, HoneyBee, and Open Studio. And this workflow, the goals was really dealing with alternate generation, dealing with minimized energy consumption, maximize the daylight, maximize view quality. And you guys have links to all this stuff, and this is actually a little website that you can go to kind of look at this. If you do use those other tools, you can actually download all the files and play around with this workflow, if you want. But this is a website that they had put together.

      And really, at the end of the day, this has really got two parts to it. One of it is computational design, where John has a series of inputs that he's doing. We're mimicking those same inputs over on our side using Dynamo. And then we're pushing this up into Fractal because what we want to do is we want to run through all the different alternates to see, maybe, which one best fits with what we're trying to do as a computational design.

      And then Fractal, once we pick out some of our favorites, what's really cool is that we can download those individual Dynamo graphs that has those unique inputs, and actually then bring that into Revit, run Dynamo for Revit, and actually develop the model. And then from there, we can start doing our energy analysis on it. And so that, hopefully, kind of gives everybody a little bit of the workflow.

      I use xline sometimes, as a crazy person, to be honest. But it helps me work with clients, especially when I'm dealing with complex workflows like this. I'm working with John, who's also into research and development, but sometimes working at a high level. And I paint the picture for these people, and to understand, hey, this is kind of what the workflow is.

      And so using xline, I kind of broke it out and said, well, look, there's going to be this first part where we're going to be dealing with computational design. That's going to be our Dynamo graph. That's going to be using Project Fractal to kind of work through the design alternates. And then we're going to pick out some of our favorites. And then we're going to download those Dynamo graphs, we're going to come into Revit, we're going to start up a mass family, and then we're going to run it to create that geometry.

      From that geometry, we're going to slap some building elements on it. And then at that point, we can do our daylighting. We can do insight for energy performance. We can do view analysis. Revit doesn't have view analysis, right? We dream it has view analysis. So we had to build up two more graphs, line of site and quality view. So you guys have access to that stuff, too, and [INAUDIBLE] [? backward ?] engineer that.

      So we had to build two more graphs. So really, at the end the day, we had one large graph over here and two more over here. And then I snuck this in. I talked to John. His workflow didn't have anything to do with solar analysis, but I talked him into-- because I'm like, oh, have your staff probably goes through this whole louver design.

      Does louvers help with this or not? Can we look at the numbers to see what it's doing to the building performance? And so I brought in solar analysis not only for PV analysis, but also for louver analysis. I'll show you the work that I did there on the classroom.

      So think of this as really two parts. We've got this part 1 over here and part 2 over here, and we've got this middle piece where we're using Revit to generate the geometry from Dynamo. OK. Again, this is all going to be up on Autodesk Knowledge Network here in the next month or so. It's also going to be pushed out onto YouTube. So you'll see the two workshops I put on with Perkins & Will on that.

      So this is kind of what it looked like. In fact, if I jump into a Dynamo, a little bit of spaghetti action going on here. All right. If I go ahead and hit the Run tool, it'll go ahead and generate the graphics for the classroom. And these are the different inputs that John wanted to deal with, length, width, height, offset. Because the two classrooms can part away from each other. There's an offset distance in there.

      Obviously, we've got some window sizes. We've got a window to wall ratios. Clear story windows are part of this, and so on and so on. Roof overhang, roof pitch. So there's quite a few different inputs in here. Yeah, there's some spaghetti in here. So it's definitely not a basic Dynamo graph, I would say. It's a little bit more intermediate to advanced.

      But the thing is then we published this up to Fractal to start looking at the results. And it's a little ridiculous, they ran into the same problem with Grasshopper, and so on. Everybody see how many design alternates, if I hit Run right now? 9.5. It wouldn't finish that, so first of all.

      So John was running into the same issue on his side with the other software. So he has a table on that website of things that needed to bolt down a little bit. Look, we're all going to deal with certain length. We're just going to have to deal with that. And then a couple of these other ones we either unchecked or we said, hey, there's only going to be three inputs, or there's going to be only two inputs, or five inputs.

      So based on what he had put together with his workflow, based on his inputs, we got it down to about 2,500 runs is what it did. And this is interactive, by the way. This little graph up here, this is all interactive. But we started looking at some of the inputs and started picking out some of ours that kind of was fitting some of the design criteria like what they were doing on their side.

      And each one of these, by the way, you'll notice as I pick on this, do you see how it's changing up there? So it's remembering what those inputs are and it's actually changing this. And what's kind of cool is then if I want to save as an individual Dynamo graph, I can just save it as this and download it. I don't have to sit there and try to remember what those inputs were. It actually is doing that for me, so that all I have to do, then, is fire up Revit, create a mass family, run the Dynamo graph, and I got that building based on those inputs. All right.

      So really, if you start sorting this out in your head a little bit, within a day, using computational design and using Autodesk's sustainability tools, in a day, I can rip through a lot of design alternate, looking at which one is really giving me the performance that I want to do. Maybe I could pick out one that I thought was going to work, and then realized, man, that's going down the wrong way. I can come back in, maybe make some changes to it, rerun it again. So it's a very practical workflow, at the end of the day, to give us some informed decisions about what's going on.

      The other thing I want to mention, too, is this is very scalable. We call this the building maker is what we call this. So we work with some clients on this process, because they look at that classroom and go, well, that's really dinky, Jarod. I mean, we deal with big stuff. And I'm like, well, Dynamo can do that, too.

      So we put this together just as an exercise to show clients, hey, it can be larger than this. You can go through a bunch of different design alternates the same way. It can be very large. We can move the stair towers around. We can do whatever we want. It's really just sitting down and teaching someone a little bit more about what to do with Dynamo. So just understand, it doesn't have to be a little classroom. It can be something much larger in scale.

      So that's one of the things that I want to mention is this is very scalable. Sometimes I just show that classroom and people sometimes don't get that it can be much larger. So the idea was you download those things, and then you can bring it into Revit, and then run the Dynamo graph, and it builds, basically, the geometry. So just to give you a taste of that, if I come in here, I'll close this. And let's just open up this one here. You can get some ideas.

      Now, creating an energy model here, we're talking seconds here on this one. But basically, we developed that piece of geometry that Dynamo built for us, and then we're just slapping some building elements on here, and then we can start doing our energy analysis off of that and start working with it. So pretty easy, little workflow to go through and it kind of helps people understand some of the other things that you can do with it.

      Now, like I mentioned earlier, their workflow also had some view analysis to it, which is not built into Revit. So we had to create a couple, or two additional Dynamo graphs. This one, the direct line of sight, is based on LEED 4.0. So we're just looking at the rules that they are doing and following the rules using Dynamo.

      And this basically will create a plan view. It'll put the filled region in here. Again, you guys have access to this Dynamo graph. And then it'll pop the numbers out so you can understand a little bit about what's going on with that. It also creates an Excel spreadsheet, by the way. So you can take the numbers somewhere else if you wanted to.

      So we had to build a direct line of sight, Dynamo graph. We also had to do a view analysis for a Dynamo graph. So basically, coming out of the windows, what type of view are we seeing? So this could be maybe a park across the street. This could be some other quality view item. And we just need to understand, from those windows, is that intersecting that or not? And again, based on LEED credentials and looking at that.

      And so if I come back to Revit, we can look at some of that. And going back in and looking at [? quality ?] view. And it's really up to you on the plan view, where you want to run the Dynamo graph. But again, it's pretty simple. It's just putting filled regions down so we have some sort of graphic along with that. And the quality view, if we look at this, which is this original view, how we wrote our Dynamo graph is these are just model in place.

      We just want to make it simple. So we just drew some rectangles, extruded it real quick. And then it's just looking through the windows to see. And then we're building these triangle pieces so we can have a nice idea of where it's being intersected, to look at that. And so again, you guys have access to these Dynamo graphs you can backward engineer and look at it.

      This also produces an Excel spreadsheet. So this was a big deal. This needed to be part of that analysis. You look out the window. Do you see this lovely view, which is great. I'm from Colorado so sometimes we get to see that view. Or sometimes if you're downtown, you get to see this view. So depends on the quality.

      And then lighting analysis is a big piece with their workflow. So again, we had to go through and look at that workflow that they came up with, basically follow through with the same thing using the lighting analysis tools. This one, again, is cloud-based, so you get results back really quick on this. The other thing that sometimes people don't realize, it does have all the different LEED versions, by the way. And based on that, it does create a schedule. I don't think everybody understands that at times.

      This actually creates a schedule you can look at, and it's based on LEED. And you can look at that information, obviously, and put that on a sheet and print it out. And then you also get these colored versions to understand where things are, as for hotspots, cool spots, things like that. Sometimes people don't realize you can pick on this and go over to Properties and make changes over here. Is it 9:00 AM or is at 3:00 PM? Sometimes people miss this over in the Properties.

      So just to show this real quick. If I jump back in here to Revit. I can show this also. And open this up. And one of the things is when you run those results, by the way, those results do get to be part of the Revit file. So at any given time, if you need to rerun those, to show those again, to print them, to do whatever you want, you just need to come up and pick on the lighting tool. It actually remembers which ones you ran within this model. And it's just up to you and I, then, to choose which one we want to grab, and then just go ahead and hit the Go button. And it'll basically bring it back up.

      It gives you a quick little summary. Again, the schedule basically has all this information, by the way. But just to give you a quick summary. It always puts the legend in the wrong spot. That's a guarantee. But you can pick on it. You can move out of the way. And that's another thing, too. A lot of people don't realize that you have control over all of this. Again, you can pick on this. It's kind of like if you've ever done color colored books with some of the rooms, and things like that.

      You can come over here. There's a visual style to it. And you can control how that is. Sometimes people would like to see numbers down there. You can actually do that. You can turn that on. You can control how tall the font is, and all that stuff. So you can come over here and you can build your own really cool one, if you want, instead of using the boring ones from Autodesk. So take advantage of that, too. Sometimes people don't realize that you have that capability. So some other additional tools that sometimes people don't realize that you have access to.

      And then this is the one I slip through working with John. I say slip through. I showed him kind of what I was up to, and what the classroom, and the results. And he's like, really, staff needs to understand that that's part of the tool set. This is another one that's been validated by NREL. They have a tool called PV Watch that they use to validate it. So this is another one that we trust.

      I love this little picture down here, where we have a little Revit families that look like solar panels and you stick them on there. Eveybody's seen these little lovely trees that we have in Revit, but you can actually use those. You can put heights to them. The solar variation school actually sees that and actually is a part of that. And that's something, too, we want to be very clear. Insight does the same thing.

      So one of my workflows is working with InfraWorks and Civil 3D. CyberCity has some really cool building scapes that you can bring into InfraWorks. I can put my model into InfraWorks. I can do an energy analysis. And if a building is shadowing my building half the time, Insight actually calculates that, too. So it's something that if you have context models next to it, it actually looks at that.

      But what people don't understand is that it's not all about just PV. The unique thing about this particular tool is that you can actually go out and pick any surface that you choose, and it will basically run the analysis based on that particular surface. And so this is what intrigued John when I showed this to him, was, well look, on the side of the classrooms, depending on what we were doing with the window ratio and what we chose for inputs, these might be very large and they might be capturing maybe too much sun. If we put louvers on there, maybe we can start seeing what the difference is. Like in this example, you can see that it's doing about 10,000, but down here, we got it down below 7,000 by putting some louvers on it. That's a huge impact.

      So he loved the idea. The one thing that I want to mention is when everybody sees this, they're like, oh, you did a curtain wall. You used a curtain wall on that. That's a work in progress. We can't use curtain wall right now. We have to use model in place. Now, when I sometimes say that, people wince a little bit, first of all. But then the other thing, they're like, well, that's static. And I'm like, who told you that it has to be static?

      You could even do some global parameters to make it not static. In my case, I just made a smart array to make it not static. So again, if I think this out and use the parameters that are built into Revit and take advantage of it, these don't have to be static. So my example here to show you is that, first of all, if I run the analysis-- let me do this real quick, just to show you the workflow. There's one little thing that you need to be aware of.

      So if I go over here and grab the Solar tool, it, by default, thinks you always want to go after the roof systems. And in this case, I'm going to switch it to User Selection. You get a little warning box. I just close that thing down. It automatically highlights the roof, so you got to sit here and you got to pick on the surfaces, say no, I'm not wanting to deal with the roofs. And then you pick whatever surface or surfaces, if you want, in this case, I'm just picking the floor.

      The other thing I want to mention, too, is this little thing up here on the option bar. So everybody gets in here and then they get like, this thing, it's not working, Jarod. And it's like, did you hit the Finish button up here on the option bar? The famous option bar that everybody forgets about up here. So you got to hit Finish before it's like, oh, I see what you're doing. And then come down here. And I'm not going to use the one that I produced. Let's just use one of the default ones so you can see that. It also creates a CSV, so again, it writes this out in an Excel spreadsheet.

      But if I go ahead and hit Update-- and this takes, again, seconds to do this. FormIt has the same mechanism built into it, which is cool. And so it gives me the results. Again, it always puts the legend in the wrong spot. So you just move it around. But it's giving me that input really quick. If I wanted to do another variation of that, I can come in here, pick on my model in place, edit it.

      I used a smart array, so I can just pick on one of these and say, well OK, I did 12 louvers. Let's try seven louvers and let's rerun that design and see what seven does to us. This does not have to be some sort of static piece. When people say model place, it can be dynamic, also. OK.

      So some great tools. It was great working with John to go through this workflow. Again, don't forget about the view and how you can change that. And you can create your own little views, and you put numbers on there, and dots, and whatever you want to do. But that gives you a really quick overview of what's going on, how we are using all of these tools to develop this workflow. Like I said, it's part 1, part 2.

      So if your firm's not completely into the Dynamo thing, you saw good results of using part 2 and all of the analysis tools that comes with Revit, and you can start using those tools, like I said, today, as we go through it. Really quick, to finish up here, I just wanted to throw out some best practices. If you go up to LinkedIn and reach out to me, you'll see a bunch of articles that I've been writing on some of this stuff.

      The first thing sometimes I run into is, Jarod, I don't see any of these tools. What's kind of funny is the interface, it might be turned off. It does happen every once in a while, so I run into that sometimes with clients. They don't know about the plugins, so make sure you download the plugins. Sometimes IT folks don't know that you want these tools, so you've got to talk to them.

      Make sure, since it is the solar-- or not solar, but the other tool. I'm totally drawing a blank. The other analysis tool that it was using for daylighting does use cloud credit, so you could you got to have that plugged into your account, so just a heads up. And then just a couple of best practices. When you first try this on your own, I always tell people, no matter what, no matter what, this never changes. Even though you might not have masses in there, always keep it to conceptual masses and building elements, no matter what.

      No. Just leave it alone. I know there's a dropdown, but just act like it's not even there, OK. Try 1'6" and 1 foot. It's probably going to work just fine. If you're not with dealing with masses, just set the parameter zone depth to zero. What that's for is inside, where is the first interior wall located, and it just helps with the building performance when it does the analysis, if you're dealing with masses, like FormIt. If you pick an edit, just make sure your building type is set up correctly.

      Export is always dealing with rooms, typically. And don't, don't touch the detail elements. I know it's there. I know you want to touch it, but don't. Just leave it alone. Dan Stein is a good buddy of mine. He read a really good article about a month and a half ago about this. If you want to go down that road, it's dealing with materials and assets and it's a little bit of a rabbit hole.

      You don't have to go down that rabbit hole. Just don't touch it. You'll get some really good results out of it still. OK. These are really some of the things-- and you guys set your location, of course. That's how it knows what weather data to grab. OK. You got to set that up.

      All right. True north, it just makes it more accurate, so when you get it up to Insight, it actually knows exactly where true north is. If you don't, you can start working with the building orientation to see what the other results is. Always, always create a 3D view, all right. If you've got a bunch of site elements in there, just select that stuff and hide it.

      All right, Hide Elements. All right, just speeds it up. If you do have a floor sitting out there like that, which is partially under something, just make sure it's non-room bounding, by the way. All right. So just, again, some best practices.

      When you first push up to Insight, just understand it's going to go to Uncategorized. At that point, you can hit Create Insight, and then you can move it over and you can start creating your own projects at that point. All right. Don't forget that you can jump back and forth between an EUI number and square foot. That's really for any of your clients. They're going to just understand it better if you deal with square footage, in most cases.

      Always, always know that it's always going to do a benchmark on you. It's always going to show you where you're at with your ASHRAE and where you're at with your 2030, which is awesome. Don't forget about the range concept that I gave you. All right. It's always going to be a full range when you first go in there, but then start thinking about high performance, mid-performance, low performance.

      The little triangle is whatever BIM setting was set up in Revit initially, which that's what the little triangle is. You can do your own little single point, which then turns to your BIM. Open it up. If nothing, use a range. When in doubt, that's always your safe bet. Don't forget that you can compare. I forgot to show you that in the scenarios, but you can compare all your scenarios together, which is awesome. I love that tool.

      And don't forget that you can also come in here and set the units, the currency. You can share it just by plugging an email in. All right. Definitely do your scenarios when you're doing some of this. And don't forget that there's a bunch of export tools on this, including your data design exchange. All right, don't forget that stuff. OK. Definitely take advantage of that. That's a great tool, something that Autodesk created for AIA for this.

      So one minute left. So a lot of stuff thrown at you. I have a huge document-- I don't know if anybody's looked at it yet-- that goes through all of this stuff. Lots of Revit files, lots of Dynamos. I hope this helped understand how two companies are taking advantage of this stuff. Please, please, please fill out the survey. I greatly appreciate it.

      Last year, again, I was one of the top rated AU speakers. Actually, I beat out Marcello one year, actually, when I did my FormIt, Insight, blah, blah, blah model. So I greatly appreciate it. Does anybody have any questions before you take off? All right, you guys have a great AU. Thank you.

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