Accelerate Your Project Planning and Design Process with Spacemaker

DANIEL GAMEIRO: Welcome to our class on accelerating your project planning and design process with Spacemaker. My name is Daniel Gameiro, and I'll be your host today. Before we deep dive into the instructional demo, I would love to tell you about the big picture since Spacemaker has just joined the Autodesk family.

So today, we will look at Spacemaker as a product, Spacemaker as a method, the Spacemaker way. We will have a look at three use-cases that I think Spacemaker really fits and a case study that will be actually our demo part.

So let's start by having a look at the phases of design, building, and operating. According to Skanska and McKinsey, more than 50% of the value creation takes place on early phase design. And that's where Spacemaker fits.

We aim to improve the early phase development by leveraging outcome-driven design. And it's the launch pad of your project and BIM. Think about it as the hub to initiate projects and progress downstream into BIM workflows with Revit and into advanced analysis workflows in Insight and other Autodesk products.

I mean, over time, we expect these boundaries between products to be reduced resulting in more seamless workflows to our users. And we will go from like a product to a more AP experience. Currently, you will need to use OBJ and IFC formats to bring that model from Spacemaker into Revit.

So what exactly does Spacemaker do? In a nutshell, Spacemaker can be explained in four critical aspects. So first one, automated data. It's all about getting that 3D digital model in just a few minutes after you are plotting the property address.

Secondly, AI-Powered design. So what we really want you to do is to focus on the creative work while the software is doing the heavy lifting for you. It will always be a step ahead of you, so you can really do the work that matters.

Real-time analysis, and that's really what really unlocks the outcome driven design experience. And not only that, it also brings us to the next point about the seamless collaboration. It's actually enabled by real-time analysis.

You can be in the same room with all those stakeholders that you collaborate with, and really have informed discussions fact-based discussions about your project. And on top of that, Spacemaker is a cloud solution. So of course, you can work on it from any part of the world.

What about Spacemaker as the methodology? And the Spacemaker way is our customer success opinionated methodology about working in early phase development. We are not deep diving on this fantastic process today. I would like just to run through the basics with you, and make sure to check out the handout of this class to learn all the details. And I will also include some bonus.

So we have four phases. First one, GO IN, Project Creation. So after you set in the plots address and Spacemaker creating that 3D digital model, you want with your team agree on the constraints and goals of that project.

Then you want to GO WIDE. You want to open your solution room and consider as many solutions as possible. And then GO DEEP. And going deep it's all about finding those red flags. Those risk areas, those things that might come very late in the project phase, but really you want to find those very early on. You want to iterate your concepts based on that insight and really conclude on the best trade off, the best version that your project can be given the constraints and goals that you have set.

And finally, GO OUT. It's all about producing the report. It's the documentation of the whole process you have done. So you can share those with all the stakeholders, including the planning authorities. So everyone can be convinced that this project is the best version that it can be.

Now, let's have a look at the use-cases. There are many more but I've decided to bring three today. The first one is site acquisition. And Spacemaker will enable you to win more sites. To get deep and measurable insights early on, reduce risk and costs by 30% and cutting lead time by 50%.

What about parallel assignments and the competitions? Well, you'll be able to win more competitions. And you'll be able to develop a proposal with an outstanding performance that really supports architectural narrative that you are proposing. So you will win because your design performs best.

What about the last one? Development of sites. That will be actually what our use-case our case study will be based on. So here is really your opportunity to maximize the project return on investment. You will get all the hard facts to convince the authorities and other stakeholders.

You will have more data-driven design, and dramatically reduce lead times and costs of design iterations and analysis. And reducing time at this stage might mean a lot of money. OK. But let's have a look to our case study. And I'm super excited about these projects here. I was actually personally involved on it.

So our use-case is a project in Copenhagen, Denmark. And it's called UN17 Village. And it aims to address the 17 sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations. NREP is a preeminent Nordic real estate developer, and they were the client of these project.

And with them, they brought Sweco and Lendager as the major consulting firms that worked on this project. And Spacemaker was invited to facilitate a discussion about the existing concept. I just want to underline here, existing concept. Because although we have seen the most success when Spacemaker is used from the very beginning, in this case, there was already a concept in place. And it really summarizes what we have talked about until now that's deep dive process. It's all about outcome-driven design and life collaboration.

So in this demo, I will show you what we actually went through in a meeting where all stakeholders were sitting around and where we had a really good conversation. Now, let's jump into Spacemaker. So Spacemaker is a cloud solution.

You want to go to our website spacemakerai.com and click Login. Once you do it, you will present with all the projects that you are working with. And these are organized with all these cases that we have seen this Spacemaker being used on.

How can we create a new project? Just click here, new project. Define the country where it's located, the group that it belongs to you. Of course, the project name, and in this case, we will say that it's a demo. Then we need to follow all the steps that are described on the down menu.

And the first thing it's about writing the plots address or the area name, by the way. Now you want to draw roughly the polygon where your property is located. Spacemaker will now integrate with the local data provider. So you can choose the exact property that you are working with. And the last step is about ordering surrounding data. So we can have that 3D digital model that we need.

Now you can see that we have already the terrain in place. Now let's just refresh, update proposals so we can see all the buildings that Spacemaker has fetched for us. So for the ones that really know this area, you might see that the buildings are not perfect, the surrounding buildings.

So let's just have a look at Google Maps and Spacemaker side by side, and you can see that these buildings here they are not perfect. How can we correct those? You can go into Setup, Edit. Here we are. And now let's focus on this building here. We want to split it into two different buildings. Let's go into duty. You can see all the commands in the menu above. Let's chose Split. Draw the line, and now here we have two buildings.

Now let's just define their height. Let's start with this one here. This one it's about 10 storeys, and in Spacemaker it has 31.5 meters. OK. Let's leave it like that. And this one here, I can see it has three stories. So let's make it 9 meters. And these are meters above sea level.

Great. And we could do that for the whole neighborhood of course. Now, terrain. Well, you can import your home terrain or you can export the existing terrain as OBJ format. In Spacemaker today, you just want to create the building better to make sure this area is completely flat. And we will draw polygon, define its elevation. And once we apply changes, it will be completely flat.

Now, vegetation. When it comes to vegetation, I'd really like to have a look at the satellite image, which we can get from this menu. And now let's throw the polygon that defines the vegetation and give it 10 meters. Cool.

There is one last thing here, and that's fill to area. And this was critical in these projects. So there are two areas that we wanted to prioritize and to optimize the number of apartments that would see. And that's this lake. Let's just make it very rough. Great stuff. Let's make it also dark blue. So it looks like butter, rename it.

And now the second one will be the open grounds. And this is actually a green protected zone that of course, has a lot of diversity and a lot of animals. So we want to really optimize as many. We want to maximize the number of apartments. And we are done with setup. It's as simple as this. We want to click Apply Changes. Apply again.

Now we will jump into analyze. We want to update the proposal. Will we go. And if we would wait, we would see that it was not completely done. We just have worked with that building that we saw that we have split, but here you can see a model that I've worked a little bit more with. We have all the vegetation we need, all the buildings are looking good.

And we are done with that first step of creating the project. What we want to do at this point is to import the existing concepts. And there are two different ways of doing so. And the first one it's about importing the situation plan. So let's expand this menu here. Going to Assets, click Import, and I'll choose our situation plan.

So here we have our picture on the left hand side. And on the right hand side it's Spacemaker world. So you want to choose four points in the original picture and the same four points in Spacemaker in order to geo-reference the image. And deep here is to choose points that are really far away from each other. So the picture sits perfectly.

Here we go. Let's click Done. And now this picture will show on the assets. And we are in design mode. So at this point, we want to draw line buildings according to the situation plan that we have just show geo-referenced.

And note that the line building is like almost drawing by hand. By just drawing the line, Spacemaker will create a building. And we want to do this in a rough way. We want to be quick. We don't want to spend too much time on being super precise. Remember, early phase development it's about potential. It's about really making these big decisions.

So here we have our preposition. Now in 3D, we need to work with the heights. Of course, we can change the stories. Let's make it two. We can also add the control point right here. And let's make this building three stories.

We could of course, also change the width of the building. Let's make it the 11.8. Right. And now we would want to do this for the whole proposition. Again, I've already done that job in advance. So you can see here we have the whole original concept drawn as line buildings.

Our second option is to import again. And this time, we will import an IFC module that we have produced from Revit. So you want to make sure that this model is geo-referenced. So you can choose the coordinate system and check this, create a new proposal from this file option. Then we click Finish.

And that's really what I wanted to stop just a second here. It's a big point what we are doing here, because that's what's actually what happened in reality. So we were there all the stakeholders that work with that project around the same table, we import the model into Spacemaker. And at this point, we started at deep diving process is really looking for the red flags and making sure that this proposal performs as best as the context allows for.

First thing we have a look of course, for all the areas for all the different buildings. But then we start having a look at the living qualities, and Sun was, of course, the first one. OK. We go. Let's orient towards North and make it 3D. Here we can see a sun analysis.

We can click on the interface and see exactly how many sun hours we get on each point. This looks quite good. But here we have our first red flag. So if you click zero hours of the sun, we could probably do a little bit better.

Now we want to change into the units mode and went into a specific apartment. And on the right hand side, you will be able to check how many hours is this apartment exposed to. That's very little, just a few minutes probably. And we are considering the best day of the year. So you can see right here, the 21st of June. So for sure we could do a little bit better.

Now, let's have a look at daylight. And daylight, I'm really passionate about. OK. So several studies as you probably showed that daylight has a direct effect on our health. And Spacemaker allows us to assess daylight from day one from that first catches that you do.

And Spacemaker uses a method that it's called Vertical Sky Components which measures how much one point in the facade it's exposed to light from the sky. And the output are three different categories. The first one would be the light green, it means that there will be no issues achieving daylight compliance.

Everything that is light blue means that we would need big windows, but it's still possible. Everything that it's dark blue means that it's extremely risky, and it will be hard to achieve daylight compliance. And we can see that we have all the first-- the ground floor here is really low. We have some points here that have 80% vertical sky components. That's actually very low. We really want to work with that.

Great. Now let's have a look at wind. That will be our-- No. Let's have a look at the views first. So view to area really, that's something that the group was extremely-- that really wanted to prioritize. And what we realized was that this building here that is marked with the red circle has fantastic views.

And what was maybe surprising about it is that it is where the most affordable typology is located. And in contrast with that, we have the family typology that was here on the back on the Northeast corner, that we can see that didn't have that really great view.

So the whole group was a bit surprised. We start discussions around the table. What should we do? And we understood that a great idea would be to actually swap those typologies. So bring the family typology in the front and the affordable ones to the back.

Great. And now let's have a look at wind. Wind is actually extremely complex. But I will try to do my best to explain up here. So what you are looking at is a wind comfort scale. And the wind comfort scale is based on wind simulations for the eight different directions you can see on the wind roads.

And that results are wait for considering how often the winds blow from that direction during one year. And the result of this it's a super easy to understand map, where for example, light green would mean that it's very comfortable and yellow would mean that it's not super comfortable.

So we would need to actually minimize these areas that we see here in area by the lake, as well as some wind coming from between the buildings to the courtyard. So this is for sure something that we would like to address. So we have seen these issues. What have we done in life in the meeting? We went to Design and we just started writing.

So what we did was we went back to our line buildings, we duplicated that original concept, we rename it. Let's call it concept A. And we just start trying out things. Trying out some ideas all together as a team.

First thing we did was to remove this part of the building A in order to maximize evening some coming from the West. Let's extend this one here maybe even bring it a bit more to the West. So we get as much area as possible on the North-East corner for the affordable typology. Right.

In this building, we have tried the same idea we thought. OK, let's create maybe a C-shape building that also gets quite a lot of evening sun. And when it comes to the Nordic area where the family typologies will be located, we thought, OK, let's occupy this area by the lake that had a lot of problems with wind and remove that part of the buildings in order to improve daylight. So this was our concept A.

We also have considered another concept. Let's call it concept B. I mean, to be honest, we consider many more alternatives, but for this demo today, we will only look at these two. And on concept B, we thought, OK, let's actually not remove the buildings towards the street because the authorities might not allow to do otherwise. And let's make this one also a c-shaped but now towards South.

And when it comes to Nordic family typology, we will do the same. We will just remove the part at that really bad daylight. And now let's just run an analysis. And what is cool about Spacemaker is that as soon as you click Analyze, all these analogies start running in the clouds. And you can see these blue bubble. There it means that they are running, and they are not completely immediate but they are really quick. Now, I will just swipe to the right.

And what you see here on your screen, it's on the left hand side, you see the original concept. And on the right hand side, you see option A. So this is just like a comparison we are doing side by side so we start learning. This is outcome-driven design happening just in front of us.

So as you know we have this issue, and in the new version it's fantastic. It's now 9.4 hours of sun. But we create a much bigger issue. And sometimes it's like that. In order to solve something, you actually make everything else a bit worse. So we were a bit surprised with the results over there.

And when it comes to daylight, what we realized was that it actually improved quite a lot. We still have some issues on the ground floor but it's much slower. But what really happened is that area between the new volume and the sea volume, it became much worse. We have a lot of dark blue area and we can't have that.

So actually by trying to solve something, we did it much worse. So when it comes to the wind, now we are looking at comfort scales again. What we see that when it comes to this courtyard, it actually improved a little bit.

However, we see that these on here it's terrible. And we have also some wind coming from this opening. So we don't want to keep that opening. Now let's have a look at the option B, way better. So great courtyards. Perfect. We still have some issues for sure, but it looks way better.

Now let's have a look at some conditions. So no dark blue areas, everyone was very, very excited about this. It looked the right strategy. And what about the daylight? So remember that this is the affordable typology that now it's on the back.

Let's see how does it look way better. Just see here, we went from nine to 13 vertical sky component on one of the worst points. No dark blue areas towards the family typologies. It just looks bright.

Let's have a look at the dew to area. I'm not expecting big surprise here of course, but we see family typology as great views towards the open rounds and towards the lake. So no big surprises there. But the affordable typology that went on the lake, see, it actually got incredible views towards the open grounds. So we actually found an extremely good trade off here. Just compare how it was in the beginning.

And now, let's have a look here. And of course, the big elephant in the room. When we were iterating, we were not really looking to the shape. We were just discussing strategies. And we can see that option B is not as exciting as the original concept.

So what we have decided was let's export this model in IFC format, and the architects will iterate on it in private. And let's meet again in a week. And that's actually what we have done. So let's just go back, import again, that concept. How do we import? We create a new proposal, we're going to Asset, Import, and I'll choose the revised. Looks great.

Well, to our reference in the world. And here we are. Just see. So we have the right areas just like the targets we had initially. The whole proposition looks way better. It actually became architects. You can see that the family typology is now a little bit smaller. We have more of the affordable ones on the back. Great. Some conditions, see here.

This area remember we had zero. These apartments will be exposed to seven hours of sun. That's really good. Well, no more apartments with zero hours of sun. And of course, we also had to look at the winds.

I mean, we try to just to understand how reliable this was because these wind rose is actually fetched from the closest weather station and realize that it's actually quite accurate. The weather station was closed. And we tried to focus a bit on the flows from West that we saw that were a bit difficult to see. And then actually, you can click directly on a point to see exactly all the wing performance that specific area.

And what we realized was actually maybe by placing some trees in this area, the wind might slow down and create a much better situation internally in the project. And that's it. I'm so proud of this project. Everyone did an awesome work. And I saw the future of real estate development happening in front of me. That's why I was so excited and why I wanted to share this case with you today,

And we came to the end of our class. Thank you so much. I hope you had a lot of fun. I had, and I hope to see you soon. Have a great day.