Description
Key Learnings
- Explore how Autodesk Forma software's outcome-based approach transforms young talents' design processes.
- Learn how teaching Autodesk Forma today boosts Autodesk's vision for outcome-based BIM.
- Explore the differences between teaching outcome-based versus model-based design methods.
Speakers
- Daniel StineDaniel John Stine AIA, IES, CSI, CDT, Well AP, is a registered architect [WI] with over twenty years of experience in the field of architecture. He is the Director of Design Technology and leads the internal research program at top-ranked Lake Flato Architects in San Antonio, Texas, USA. Dan has been appointed to a three-year term on the national AIA Committe on the Environment (COTE) leadership group. Dan has presented internationally on BIM in the USA, Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Slovenia, Australia, Scotland, and Singapore at Autodesk University, RTC/BILT, Midwest University, AUGI CAD Camp, NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, Lightfair, and AIA-MN Convention. By invitation, he spent a week at Autodesk’s largest R&D facility in Shanghai, China to beta test and brainstorm new Revit features in 2016. Dan teaches graduate architecture students at North Dakota State University (NDSU) Dan is a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Construction Specifications Institute (CSI), Member and Chair of the National IES BIM Standards Committee, and Autodesk Developer Network (ADN), Autodesk Executive Council - AEC, and is a Construction Document Technician (issued by CSI). He has presented live webinars for ElumTools, ArchVision, Revizto and NVIDIA. Dan writes about design on his blog, BIM Chapters, and in his textbooks published by SDC Publications.
- CBChristoph BeckerChristoph Becker has years of cross-functional industry experience as Architect (Dipl.-Ing), Real Estate Manager (M.Sc. & MRICS), and Software Strategist (MBA). He joined Autodesk in 2021 with the acquisition of Spacemaker/ Forma, an AI powered early-stage planning software and launchpad for ADSK's Vision for an AECO industry cloud of seamlessly connected workflows. As Forma Industry Strategy Manager, he always looks for the best next step towards realizing Outcome-Based BIM.
This is a modal window.
The video is bad or in a format that cannot be played on your browser
CHRISTOPH BECKER: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Autodesk University class about deploying Autodesk Forma in education. My name is Christoph Becker, with a professional background in architecture and real estate development. I joined Autodesk in 2021, with the Spacemaker acquisition.
As industry strategy manager, one of my responsibilities is to drive our education strategy for Forma, a very exciting task. Because I'm convinced that the outcome-based paradigm. Autodesk Forma introduces to the industry will be a game-changer for how we teach students about designing the built environment. I'm excited to co-host this class with Daniel Stine from Lake Flato architects. Dan, do you want to say a few words about yourself?
DANIEL STINE: Sure, thanks, Christoph. Hi, I'm Dan Stine. I'm the director of design technology at the top-ranked architecture firm in the US, Lake Flato Architects. I've also been teaching graduate architecture students at North Dakota State University for 10 years now. I'm a registered architect. I've written 19 textbooks. One of them is the number one Autodesk Revit textbook in North America.
And then, two other quick things I want to share, just because I think they're really exciting, is I'm on the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment leadership group at the National level. There's 10 of us-- or actually, 12 of us-- that oversee all things COTE. And then, I'm also the chair of an IES, the Illuminating Engineering Society committee. And we just published a new technical memorandum, TM-32-24, on BIM standards for the professional lighting design industry.
CHRISTOPH BECKER: Awesome. Thanks, Dan. So quickly, sharing the safe harbor statement, you might have seen that in every presentation at AU. So you've seen it. I've done my part. Let's just jump into the presentation.
So let's start with a quick overview of what we will cover today. I will start with a quick intro to the outcome-based paradigm, including how it differs from traditional approaches, and how it relates to the current formal offering, as well as to Autodesk's vision of an industry-spanning cloud environment. I'll go on to share some early learnings from education pilots we ran in universities across Europe. And then, I will hand over to Dan, who will share examples of Forma being used in North American universities, including his own hands-on experience with teaching Forma to graduate students.
So let's dive right in. In the last 40-some years, Autodesk led three digital transformations, from hand drafting to electronic drawings with CAD and AutoCAD, then, about 20 years ago, with the introduction of BIM, moving from 2D to 3D with a model-based approach, bringing 3D, parametric modeling to all disciplines in AEC. And about seven years ago, we started to connect BIM data in the cloud. For the future of BIM, we see an outcome-based approach supported by granular data and AI as the next big leap forward. So let's take a step back and explore what we mean with outcome-based.
At a high level, outcome-based stands for a new Autodesk paradigm that puts outcomes for users, the community, and the environment at the center of the design process from the start. The paradigm is supported by a set of technologies enabling professionals to make informed design decisions, optimizing outcomes for all stakeholders. It can be summarized by three core value drivers.
First, it's about automating previously tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks by leveraging smart digital tools, including AI. The resulting efficiency gains enable designers to explore more design options faster. This ensures that all promising paths are assessed before detailing the design that is best suited to produce the required outcomes, rather than prematurely closing off the idea space to only one or two alternatives, as is typically done in traditional design first, analyze second approaches.
Secondly, it's about leveraging integrated analysis tools for a magnitude of relevant insights to support design decisions. In an outcome-based environment, designers have direct access to insights on projected outcomes of their design decisions in context. With the help of AI, analysis and simulations can be done in real time and correlated with many other data points, all while designing, ultimately leading to more timely and better-informed discussion about quality and performance across stakeholders.
And lastly, it's about breaking up data silos traditionally causing inefficient and fragmented processes to create truly connected workflows. In connected workflows, information flows seamlessly across stakeholders and project phases from project inception to operation. This unlocks the opportunity to redefine cross-stakeholder collaboration, drastically reducing risk and avoiding the needs for reworks. Also, in an outcome-based workflow, every new design iteration can and should be reassessed with the integrated, real-time analysis tools, creating a continuous, positive feedback loop that ultimately ensures better, more sustainable outcomes for users, the community, and the environment.
Here's an overview of how this new outcome-based paradigm enhances the traditional, model-based approach. Traditionally, exploring design options was very time-consuming, as it involved several tedious and repetitive manual tasks. Consequently, designers typically limited their efforts to exploring only one or two design alternatives. In an outcome-based approach, many of these tasks can be automated, or considerably accelerated, with the help of parametric and generative design tools boosted by Autodesk AI. This frees up vast amounts of time that can be used to explore all promising design options across various outcomes before closing out any solution path.
Traditionally, limited access to decision support led to a focus on quickly detailing a digital model, often with next to no contextual information. Design decisions were largely based on assumptions or hunches, and analyses were almost exclusively performed by external specialists, however, usually at a later project stage, where the purpose of the analysis was limited to assessing if the design meets minimal project requirements.
In the outcome-based paradigm, easy to use, integrated analysis tools democratize access to previously siloed information and limit the dependency on external specialists. Design decisions can now be based on insights from real-time analysis in a georeferenced, data-enriched context from the start. Thus, analyses and simulations, boosted by Autodesk AI, are not mere evaluation methods of detailed models anymore, but instead, have become integral creation methods.
And lastly, the traditional fragmentation of workflows caused by siloed data locked away in proprietary file formats across multiple, specialized desktop tools can now be transformed into truly connected workflows in an open and expandable ecosystem of solutions and data. In an outcome-based approach, granular data capabilities ensure that information moves freely across tools, stakeholders, project phases, and verticals so that designers always have access to the best tool for each task, while staying connected to one digital source of truth throughout the project life cycle.
Now, this slide is to show how, in an outcome-based process, AI-boosted, real-time analysis helps preload AECO projects with insights on outcomes so that design decisions can be based on data. In the traditional, model-based approach, design choices are largely based on assumptions. And the understanding of how a design performs in context only increases incrementally as the project evolves. Insights on outcomes lag far behind model complexity and often materialize too late, when design changes have already become very costly or simply unfeasible.
The outcome-based paradigm flips the relationship between insights and model complexity on its head. Analyses on project outcomes can now already be done at the concept stage, with relatively low LOD-- so Level Of Detail. The gained insights facilitate better-informed discussions about expected and desired outcomes earlier in the process, enhancing cross-stakeholder collaboration. Design decisions can now be based on tested data so that model complexity can be added incrementally, optimizing for outcomes from the start.
Now, let's take a look at how this relates to Autodesk Forma. On a high level, Autodesk is Autodesk's commitment to bring outcome-based BIM to the AECO industry. Current Forma in market offering brings outcome-based workflows to planning and early-stage design of buildings and neighborhoods. The vision for Forma is the AECO industry cloud will, over the next years, bring outcome-based BIM to the entire AECO industry, across stakeholders, phases, and verticals.
So let's now look at some learnings from early education pilots that we did across Europe. Since its launch, Autodesk Forma was leveraged by forward-thinking educators in several universities across Europe. This list is far from complete. It merely shows those examples where educators participated in an online survey and agreed to sharing their quotes publicly.
You can see that the core subjects are not limited to architecture, but include related fields like master planning, property development, construction management, and sustainable energy engineering. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Here are some tokens from how these educators experienced the value Forma brings to their teaching. I will use the same framework of core paradigm value drivers introduced before and highlight some quotes that support our assumption that Forma provides better, more sustainable learnings.
So when it comes to faster project setup and design auctioneering with automation, Susa, from Aalto University in Finland, for example, claims that Forma supported her students' learning process as they could easily compare their impact across multiple solutions. Rune, from Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark, adds that "Forma relieves time and effort to focus on the key architectural issues and potentials of the study project."
Regarding early insights and outcomes in context, Gordon and Brian, from SETU in Ireland, found that Forma helped their students understand the implications of their design decisions. And Rune claims that, with Forma, his students reached further with their projects and could focus on the architectural qualities. "Insights that usually require years of experience to understand became present in the design process."
And lastly, when it comes to Forma supporting evidence-based discussion and collaborative problem-solving, Susa explains how "working with Forma enables the systematic testing, information-based decision-making, and comparison of options," supporting "evidence-based argumentation, collaboration, and even co-creation, which," according to her, "are essential skills in planning." And lastly, Erling and Terje, from NMBU in Norway, state that Forma gave their students "means to understand design and massing" and opened the table for quicker discussion across professional fields.
With this, I'd like to hand over to Dan, who will change continents and dive deeper into his very own experience with teaching Forma to graduate students in North America. Take it away, San.
DANIEL STINE: Thanks, Christoph. Really great introduction. I love the background, and it'll really set the stage for talking about teaching Forma in North America. First, I wanted to make a couple of comments. I forgot to mention, in my intro, that I also lead the research program at Lake Flato Architects. And that involves a lot of asking questions and exploration. And you'll see some of that, the value of using Forma in doing research on a building design, for example.
This doesn't really change the idea of outcome-based design in this paradigm, doesn't change the fundamental idea of what a university experience is, of solving problems. In fact, this helps facilitate that in even a more significant way. And then, when you think about architecture, we're also trying to instill upon the students the idea of 3D thinking.
In fact, another example of this idea of outcome-based design is something I've been teaching my students for a number of years now, before Spacemaker and Forma. And that's Autodesk insight. I'll just quickly share this idea of how it fits into this concept that we're presenting before I move on to the next slide. So Autodesk Insight is an early energy modeling tool that allows students to explore a building's energy use, or operational carbon, early on in the design process without actually having to specific things like buildings, R-value, the envelope R-values, and the rotation of the building.
In fact, if they just have a simple form, they can push it to Insight, which automatically adds perimeter and core thermal zoning. It's ASHRAE 140 validated. And then, it actually calculates a range of values for each input, thus allowing you to really understand what the envelope and the orientation of the building want to be. And then, you can go back to the design and layer in passive strategies and active strategies to really come up with the best design solution.
And so like Christoph was showing in one of his slides, one of the graphs about applying this early on, it's very much true that the earlier we can look at sustainability and then apply passive strategies, that very significantly reduces the need for active strategies such as HVAC systems. So with that in mind, we'll move on, into my presentation.
So just in recent weeks, I actually put together this slide to try and have something comparable to Christoph's slide of the European examples. And so there's my course at North Dakota State University that I teach Forma in. There's also a program-- I'll show some examples in just a moment-- from Professor Pablo Laroche in Cal Poly Pomona in California.
There's a few question marks here I still have to fill in before our live presentation in San Diego at Autodesk University in October. But Cesar Escalante, from Autodesk, he also teaches Autodesk Forma at the California College of Arts, and then, Glenn Katz, at Stanford. And then, this last example is one that's really being introduced to Penn State via a guest lecture by myself, for Dr. Azari, who teaches a building environmental systems course.
All right, so back to Cal Poly Ponoma. This is a really exciting example of layering in the use of Autodesk Forma by Professor Pablo La Roche. And one thing that's great about this-- and this is something I always tell my students-- is that it's one thing to just put a tool on your resume or your CV, but it's another thing to just have it become part of your portfolio. And by including it in the portfolio and your design solution, it really becomes apparent to those who are looking at potentially hiring you for what could be a student's dream job-- it can really make a big difference in competing with their fellow classmates, or other students around the country, or even people with experience.
Because I'm often on the other side of the equation, looking at resumes and portfolios. And even today, it's not always a given that a student coming out of university has experience doing energy modeling, or embodied carbon analysis, or daylight analysis, or using a tool like Autodesk Forma. So here, you can see a really interesting design with a few examples of Forma, showing lighting, and wind, and microclimate data. I'm going to go back for just one second. And I wanted to point out that the students' names are in the lower right of these two slides.
And then, now, for my particular program at North Dakota State University, this is one of those examples of one of the reasons I mentioned that we're not-- one of the examples of using technology. And we know that universities aren't meant to just teach technology, and students how to get a job. But when you look at this idea of outcome-based design, this new paradigm concept that Christoph presented, this really helps understand the design solution, and not only that, but the opportunity to go back and modify it to make the design better.
Ultimately, we have a climate crisis that we have to solve. So using tools like this that are easy, accurate, validated are really important to be able to arrive at the best design solution that will improve the building's performance and reduce the embodied carbon. So here's an example on the right here. I have a couple more pictures, on the next slide, of me presenting Forma in the classroom.
Some of the things that are really compelling about using Forma in a classroom is to be able to understand the existing site conditions. Really, we want to have an understanding of how our design solution, our proposed design, impacts a site. And to do that, ideally, you would look at the microclimate, and wind, and traffic noise analysis, for example, before even adding anything new to the site, whether it's an urban context or otherwise. So we can look at wind, and noise temperature, cloud cover, humidity.
We can even, optionally, upload a EnergyPlus weather file. And that could be historical weather file or a future weather file. I have an example, coming up, showing how we can look at future weather files.
Another interesting thing is we are all talking about AI these days. Autodesk Forma has a really practical application of using AI to help understand design decisions in real time, while you're making the design. But then, there's still an opportunity to do a more complicated, time-consuming, 30 to 90-minute computational fluid dynamics, wind analysis, for example.
Another thing that's really important that I think instructors will be happy to hear is that Autodesk actually created this connector for Rhino. So if you're not familiar with Forma at all, you might not be aware of the fact that geometry can come from multiple sources, from Revit, SketchUp, Rhino. And in the case of Rhino, there's a connector inside of Rhino that can push and pull geometry between the two applications.
And then, there's third-party options. I think this is probably one of the most intriguing things about Forma is that it's not just a proprietary, closed system that's being solely developed by Autodesk. There are opportunities for companies to extend the capabilities of the platform. And I have a few examples of those coming up in my presentation.
So here's another example of my class in Fargo, North Dakota. I actually teach remote, from San Antonio, Texas. So you can see, on the right there, there's an image of me in a Zoom meeting on the top, and all the students are in the classroom. So it's sort of a unique-- not listed as an online class, per se. All the students are in the classroom, and I'm the only one who's remote. But it's worked quite well for 10 years now, which is great.
So I want to get into just a couple of little kind of technical things that I think it's really helpful-- a couple of the things that I wish I knew, as an educator, about Autodesk Forma before I started teaching. Should make your implementation of it, if you decide to use this in your class, a lot easier. First of all, that the software is freely accessible, like most Autodesk software. Not all cloud solutions are completely available to students, but Autodesk Forma is one of those options.
Students do have the option-- if you look at this screen, and you go to the Autodesk education site-- to enter Forma on their own. And basically, they create their own-- what's called a-- hub, where their projects would be saved. Autodesk Construction Cloud or BIM 360 also has this notion of a hub where all the projects are saved. people are invited to that hub to collaborate.
But as an educator, one thing that's a really nice opportunity is this middle option, where you click this button, and you can create a hub that you can invite up to 250 students to. And this is what I did for my class. I plugged in all the students' email addresses and invited them to the classroom hub. You can see, on the left, I named it NDSU, and then the class name. This could also be, if you had-- I mean, the whole program probably has 250 students. So this could have been done at a higher level. But I just did it this way for my classroom, which is probably ideal for the instructor, to then be able to go in and grade students' work without them necessarily having to share the project with you.
But when students are working on collaborative student or group projects, they can share their projects with each other, and then get in there and start to collaborate on pushing geometry around, creating different design solutions, which are called proposals in Forma. But once you invite all the students to the hub, on the right, you can see they're listed as invited members. You can make them all creators instead of viewers. And then, an interesting thing that I discovered the first time I had set this up is, in this list, when a student's name isn't listed, only their email address is listed, that means that they've somehow applied and was granted access to the Autodesk student software by a different email address.
It turns out that our university actually has two different formats for email, and that was the main problem, which is probably typically going to be the case. because you can only get Autodesk software through the student program if you're using a .edu email. So anyways, once the students are all invited to the hub, then they can start using the software. And now I want to just walk through the value proposition, if you will. We've already laid out this idea of outcome-based approach to design. And so what does that really mean? And how can we use this tool to better understand a design solution and then iterate on it to make it better?
So as an example, when I first start presenting this to my students-- we'll look at an existing site. And what better to start with than where the university campus is? So in the lower right corner here is the North Dakota State University School of Architecture. It's in a separate building downtown, away from the main campus.
But anyways, having a site that the students are familiar with-- they've spent some time here. They're graduate students. They've spent a number of years already. And they understand the weather conditions, and the wind. And then, seeing it presented as a microclimate analysis of a site before they start potentially laying out a building in this large parking lot that I've outlined here-- we'll pretend like this is going to be the location of a new campus building, for example.
So with that new location in mind, we'll do a microclimate analysis. What's going on on this site before we even start modifying it? And so Fargo, North Dakota, like where I also, personally, used to live, in nearby Minnesota, is in ASHRAE climate zone 7, the coldest part of the United States. And as you can see here, it gets quite cold in January. I don't know if you know this. You can see -39 on the screen there. -40 is the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. So -40 Celsius and -40 Fahrenheit is the same temperature.
And I used to bike to work in Duluth, Minnesota with a 500-foot elevation difference at -20, so kind of crazy. But this is the world that some people live in. And as a designer, it's really important to understand the temperature. And so on the right, you can see, there's actually a dropdown list for the month, and then, the time of day, and a wind rose, and a little gauge there for the wind. And then, if we go to July-- so we click that dropdown in the upper right and switch from January to July-- you can see there's quite the temperature swing, from -40 to 85 degrees.
And then, if we think about wind, we can look at the existing conditions and understand how these adjacent, existing buildings are affecting wind, if there's any sort of wind tunnel that already is being developed. And one of the things that's interesting is you have the opportunity, as a designer, to either positively or negatively impact a site. We talk about regenerative design, which is the idea of making a site or a location better after your project. And that's a really hard thing to do. We have things like Living Building Challenge, which are doing that and rewilding sites.
So in the sense of a wind tunnel, for example, maybe there's an opportunity to improve those conditions. So when we start adding a proposed building and pieces of artifacts, we can actually see the wind actually adjust. And what we're actually looking at here, by the way, is a AI, real-time response to these elements being added. So it's really close to being highly accurate, but it's not quite. But it's enough to really give us an idea of how the things that were the artifacts and the program that we're adding, how it's affecting the site.
So as I mentioned, this is an AI-generated solution, as Christoph mentioned earlier. And he referenced one of the professors from Aarhus, Denmark, which, I actually presented at a Revit conference in Aarhus several years ago, the Revit Technology Conference. But he mentioned the idea of real time, and also, the ability for students to understand things that they haven't been fully trained in yet. And one of those ideas can be seen here.
Notice this legend in the lower right. You'll see, in the next slide, this idea of airstreams, this really cool graphic of, visually, what the air is doing. That's really cool to look at, but it's actually not that helpful to the students, to be honest. This comfort slide, or view, is really more interesting. It's basically more of an academic visualization of the results.
In the lower right, you can see the legend. If it's light green or a little bit darker green, it's comfortable to be sitting or standing in that area. And then, you get up into, it's OK to be this windy if you're strolling or walking. And then, anything that's red is uncomfortable. That's really easy to understand. You don't need to fully understand all of computational fluid dynamics to be able to utilize this, even though it has that sort of smarts behind it.
And then, in addition to this, you can actually upload custom weather data. You don't have to do this. It's optional. Forma, of course, has access to global weather data. And that's going to be historic weather data. But here's the cool view. And this is really interesting, still, to visualize and even use in presentations.
The other thing, just again, laying out the value proposition of using Forma and how valuable it can be to students to really better understand their proposed design solution and the surrounding site-- this is something we do so much now, at Lake Flato, that we never really did it before. Because the opportunity, I'm sure it was there somehow, in a Grasshopper and Rhino workflow. And we use plenty of Grasshopper and Rhino. But Forma has just made this so easy. And now I show it to students so that they can also take advantage of it-- the traffic noise analysis.
Here's an AI-generated visualization of a road-- a couple of roads-- and some train tracks. And this is projecting a decibel level of the traffic noise based on the speed limit and the average daily traffic of these different pieces. And then, if we go to this next one, this is a more formal analysis. You can see, in that particular case, there is a pretty big difference.
But here we have the decibel levels being projected onto the ground and the building. And then, we have this ability-- there's a little icon in the upper right there, where you can click on it, and then pick on the screen, and get a reading, basically, what the actual decibel level is at that location. I'm going to show some-- I'm going to talk more about those things here in just a moment.
So in my presentation to my students, I like to impress upon them some of the at scale and real-world examples that are possible. So I'm going to hit Play really quick, because this is a five-minute video. So this is a project that Lake Plato's urban planning studio is working on in Austin, Texas, right now. All of the geometry that you see here is from SketchUp. It wasn't modeled in Forma. So you could model something like this in Forma.
And one of the values of doing that is you get some metrics related to square footage of different functions. You could have residential, and commercial, and retail all listed separately in terms of square footage. But our urban planning team currently has a different workflow for that. But they still find plenty of value here, in Forma, to be able to make it worth bringing in that SketchUp geometry running this wind analysis.
And you can see there's a sort of a courtyard space being developed within these buildings. So it's helpful to understand the wind patterns within this space where there will ultimately be some outdoor dining and plazas. And so in addition to wind, there's the opportunity to look at microclimate. So again, here's January. Here's the inspect tool. So I clicked on that spot, and it said it was 65 degrees. We switch to June, and that same spot is 91 degrees.
But if we were to look at that same site before the buildings and understand what the temperatures are, we're likely creating some shaded spaces within this courtyard. Here's the sun hours for December 21. And then, we can switch that to look at the sun hours that have been previously calculated. By the way, these calculations take a little bit of time to process. But once you've calculated them, you can go back and review them at any time.
So here's June 21, which we're going to, of course, get a lot more daylight on these different parts of the building. So where I clicked and it says 7.7 hours of sun, that means, at that window location into that office, or that residence, that particular space is going to get 7.7 hours of sun.
And then, here's the traffic noise analysis. And visit really, again, quite interesting. You can see the green space within the courtyard. There is a fair amount of effort that went into positioning these groups of buildings. The retail and commercial are against the road, creating this buffer. And then, the residential is set behind that. And not only is the noise projected onto the ground, but onto the facades of the buildings. And so to really visualize this in the design is super helpful.
We've even taken this approach in interviews, showing that we can really understand the site and help come up with optimal design solutions. Again, this is professional work here being shown to students to help them understand what's possible and inspire them. Here's an example of solar energy analysis. I've created a blog post. I have a blog called BIM Chapters and a YouTube channel under my name, Daniel John Stine, where I actually show, compare the solar analysis in Forma to the Autodesk solar add-in made by Autodesk, in Revit. And that tool has-- Autodesk worked with NREL, PVWatts to come up with accurate analysis-- to show that, basically, they're all in alignment with good results.
So here I just switched proposals back to what is the existing conditions. So that's really helpful. This is the Fargo, North Dakota student university School of Architecture example that I was showing earlier. So it's helpful, those previous still images, really, just to tell the story in a very clear way. But now, here's a live example of adding some geometry. I'm adding some sort of artifact here, like a breaker wall. And the AI analysis of wind just updated in real time.
So I'm getting instant feedback. You can see the little blue button in the upper right. It says it's going to take 30 to 90 minutes to calculate a full computational fluid dynamics wind analysis. And so as I continue to add some elements here, I can see, now, I've narrowed this down to just light green and green through that space. And whether that's really the sort of design solution we want or not is something you have to continue to go back and review.
Let's see, so-- I think I just jumped ahead. All right, just a few more things to share. You can also upload future weather data. So as we consider climate change and the changing climates that we're experiencing, there's different climate models and different carbon models. And there are some really great sources out there to download epw files and upload those into Forma in terms of wind, in this particular case. And you can see that the difference as you upload different files.
So one other quick thing I want to share here is just so you can appreciate how the Rhino connector works. So here's Rhino. And you can see Autodesk Forma in the background. And notice the layers. There's just layers 1 through 5. And here's the Autodesk Rhino connector. So this is an add-in to Rhino made by Autodesk.
I clicked the option to bring in the site data. So now, all the context model that Forma created automatically, the 3D contours of the site, the adjacent buildings-- and notice, now, there's additional layers. So if we want to get those metrics I was talking about for commercial and residential, like the gross square footage, back in Forma, we can actually do that with geometry that we've created in Rhino. So here I am, creating some geometry in Rhino. I put the first floor on a different layer, and then, the upper floors on another layer. And those are the layers created by this Autodesk connector.
And then, when I push that back into Forma, it puts it on the correct functions. And you can see that I have different residential and commercial square footages from this Rhino geometry, which is really cool.
And just two last slides to share, talking about third-party opportunities. Here's an example of FenestraPro. They added a tool that allows you to do some really detailed facade analysis in Forma, looking at real-world glass options and solar heat gains-- really, really cool opportunity to use advanced analysis within Forma on super early preliminary geometry. And then, this last example here is a series I made, actually sponsored by Autodesk, on Autodesk Forma, that's on my YouTube channel.
But this example of this third-party tool is-- EHDD Architects created this tool called Epic. And it has this back-end, machine learning, AI engine called C.Scale that has a bunch of real-world building stock embodied carbon data in it that's now added to Forma. And here's an example of looking at a structure in concrete, steel, and mass timber, and really, early on, setting a benchmark, or a baseline, for embodied carbon that you can then use as your goal post throughout the rest of the project to come up with a optimally designed building.
So that's it. And we really appreciate your attention and would love to hear how you ended up implementing this in your program, if you want to reach out to Christoph or myself through LinkedIn or something like that. Christoph, you have any last words you want to share?
CHRISTOPH BECKER: No, just a great presentation, Dan. Super interesting to see, from the actual teachers and professional perspective, of how what we're doing is helpful to you. I think it's much more powerful if it really comes from the user or the teacher. And I could have said many things that we hoped would have the effect. But if you tell it from your perspective, I think it's just much more palpable. So really interesting.
And thanks, everybody, for the interest. We hope to get more examples of Forma being taught and applied in classrooms around the globe. And hope that we could spark your interest here. Thank you very much.
DANIEL STINE: Thanks.