Visualizing Design Analytics in VR with FormIt

DAVID R. BEACH: Hey everybody, I'm going to get rolling on this because I'm standing between most of you and the end of AU probably, so woo-hoo. Thanks for coming to this one and sticking it out this long.

So I'm Dave. I teach things, that's all I'm going to say about that part of this. Not that I don't care about this stuff, but I want to move forward. I want to get going.

So immersive data, analytics, VR, and collaboration are all some of the takeaway points. And this is really at an introductory level of doing this. There's not a lot of manipulation yet available to us in VR, so this isn't like I brought data into VR and crazy stuff is going to happen with the building. This is more about, how do we begin setting these things up in a VR collaborative communicative kind of way, OK?

So I'm wanting to set the expectations a little bit more to beginner level than thinking about all this stuff-- is it going to tap into Dynamo, and then all this crazy stuff is going to happen. Realistic expectations here. OK, but there's very real relevance to this talking point. And this is stuff that I see everyday as an educator.

First of all, when we're dealing with technology, there is definitely a traffic jam between your left brain and your right brain, right? As I'm teaching tech to students that are also learning how to design, technology often pushes the design thinking to its lowest common denominator because they're thinking more about what button to push than, what should I be doing creatively?

And this sort of creates an information overload, right? This is an even bigger information overload when we try and start communicating to our clients what we're trying to do with certain design parameters on a building.

So my students will often ask me questions like, how do you convince a client to do something that's creative, that's innovative, that's interesting? And one of the first things that I'll always tell them is don't sell. Don't come in with the notion that you're going to convince a client that your design is what the client should buy. That is called selling, and that is one of the first ways to turn people away from your creative ideas.

The key part to me-- what I did for 12 years as a practitioner before I switched over to academia-- the best projects that I had had the best clients. I had the best clients because I would educate them. I would bring them in early in a process and we would do a lot of collaborative thinking, a lot of collaborative design work. If a client begins to have an idea and you can develop that idea with them, those ideas often don't get [? valued ?] engineered out, which is really important to all of us that are wanting to do innovative design work.

So there are a couple of converging elements in architecture right now involving technology and clients as well. In "Thinking Like a Client," published by the American Institute of Architects, Kevin Green's research explains, well, the architectural community views design as a process-- a verb. But in this room, when I say design, we're thinking verb. The perspective of a client is quite different. Clients view design as a product-- a noun. Now, we could argue that this is simply semantics, but I think it reveals a lot more, OK?

So as a result, clients do not recognize the value of architects until it is time to produce the documentation-- the design-- well after the formative stages of a product. He also outlines the perception of a client towards an architect when a project does not meet their expectations. Quote, "A client will have a negative perception of architects as monument building artists with little practical or technical expertise. Most clients perceive architects as having been inadequately prepared during their architectural education--" I take that very personally-- "--to work cooperatively, collaboratively, with clients that properly manage business and understand the construction process."

OK, so there's this massive gap that's happening that we need to work on resolving that's twofold. First of all, improving our technical skills. So while I'm at the ACSA, which is the architectural education group-- or the AIA-- I really hammer in on this point in terms of learning technology. I'm preaching to the choir here. You're all my people, so I don't have to go there.

But what I do want to talk about in particular here is are we honing in on communicating the design process in relevant ways to our clients? That is what really started spurring some of my key ideas for this talk. How can we do some things with clients, in particular with simulation data, that engage them further in the design process?

Because if we can do that, quite simply, it raises our CVP-- our client value proposition. And, in short, if we raise our CVP, we can ask for more money. If you guys can ask for more money, you guys donate more back to universities and I can teach kids more, OK? It's really simple Business 101 kind of stuff, right?

So I used to always give this spiel about VR, and it's immersive, and its scale-- you guys all know it because you've all put the headsets on. I was at a talk this morning, who has done VR? And, like, everybody raised their hand. Again, spiel-- overblown, you guys get it. This is a key method of communicating with clients.

OK, so let's get into a little bit of the how-to's. That's the how come part, which is always so relevant to me because-- and I also mentioned this on Tuesday-- there is a portion of this talk that the how-to-- the buttons to click-- just went away. As of the keynote this last week, it just went away. And I was like, even thinking of, maybe I should, you know, start publishing a book on this portion because the workflow is really interesting and really engaging. Yeah, that whole workflow is going away. So I'll mention it when we get to that slide. Depending on time, I might even skip over a good portion of that how-to. But the why-- why we need to do this, why we should be communicating this way-- is just incredibly important.

But the how-to on step one-- and this is a part, if you were in my class on Tuesday, this is largely similar. And knowing that, I have doubled the speed of this. When you download the handout and follow the link to the video, the video does play back at normal speed. So if there's anything that's a bit too fast, it will read better for you in the online video, OK?

But we're looking at site data, building a satellite underlay, data to topography, modifications to the toposurface, and the establishment of a location. OK? So I'm working through the same site and the same information that I'm doing with my students this semester at Drury University. So we're going to go into CAD Mapper, which is an online program, and plug in our conceptual site. CAD Mapper is 100% free as long as you are underneath a kilometer, so unless you're, like, designing the Hudson Yards with this, you should be good. This is really an urban designer tool, it's less an architect's tool. But we don't know about it, and it's free, and it's pretty awesome.

So essentially, I'm selecting my location, generating the specs that I want, and it will give me this back as a DXF file that I can download. And it does this in a zip file. So I'm going to move this to the appropriate folder. And if you notice, this gives me some buildings. If the buildings have been modeled in that location, I have them. This is going to give me basic topography data.

Again, this is not to replace a civil engineering survey. This is-- I'm going to be close within a foot, maybe two feet. So again, this is great for conceptual early design thinking. This is not for construction process.

So I'm moving this into the appropriate folder. And I'm going to import the DXF file into a new Revit scene. And, like all transferring of digital 3D files goes, it comes in completely wrong. But there is a known scale value for this process. The site is not 3 feet and inches, it is 3,100 feet. So the scale conversion factor is pretty simple. I'm unpinning and scaling it numerically by 1,000.

Then I'm going to move this entire piece over, placing the conceptual site roughly at the center of the Cartesian coordinate axis, OK? Now from here, I've got some of the buildings in place, but typically, I'm very selfish with my data. Eventually I'm going to be deleting all of those. I want them to be my own data. I want them to print correctly, I want them to rep consistently across any imagery that I might make. But the key thing that I want to be able to do is turn the topography mesh into Revit topography so I have something to work with, something that I can push in a FormIt, so on and so forth.

You notice it doesn't work at all. Now I can create some of the underlays-- that's streets and roads and do it-- but the topography, the actual mesh that comes in, doesn't work at all. So what I'm going to do is temporarily delete everything, export that match as a DWG only to turn right back around and import the DWG back in. Which sounds completely ridiculous, it is completely ridiculous. But you'll see the differences in the two meshes here in just a second, and you will see pretty clearly why one is working and one is not. There is something about that import-export-- or actually, export-import-- process that cleans up the mesh.

And you can see that is a triangulated mesh that looks correct. We started discovering this technique actually way back in the day. We would import skip files, and you could import a skip file, but you can't convert a skip file into topography. So we'd export it as a DWG, bring it back in, convert it that way. Same kind of trick here.

So now I have the CAD Mapper site reimported as a DWG. Now it's converted to Revit-- native Revit topography. So I can go back in, edit points, start moving things around with the topography layer. Pretty simple to do. I'm going to delete some of the underpinning layers, that base Revit-- not the base DXF mesh for the topography, and the DWG mesh for the topography. And those are actually the elevation lines, or the elevation tags when I exported the first time and reimported them as a DWG. You know, the topography looks for everything. So it found those, so I just deleted those points.

And now what I'm going to do is, because there are some things that I need-- the widths of streets, sidewalks, foliage, some things like that-- I want to actually bring this satellite image in and use that as an underlay underneath my mesh as well. So back into Google Maps, the first thing I'm doing is verifying the distance. But you really have to go back and remember what street to what street. So I'm 851 feet on my first pass, which is clearly not 1,293 feet. Double checking street to street, and again, this is just verifying my dimensions-- 1,293. Verifying that 1,000 was the correct scale factor.

And now, if you think about an image, an image does not have scale to it. But if I do a screen grab with the scale on it, it does because I know exactly what scale I need to bring that in at. So again, just print screen. And this is not the highest resolution way to get satellite imagery for sure, but this is the way my students do it because they can do it for free.

So again, a bit of a hack method to do it. But it's very effective. Very, very effective. Not as quite high resolution as I would always like to have it, but quite effective.

So again, in Revit, import image and place it. Totally not to scale, but I still have that line. Know that line is 1,293.9 feet or something like that. So I'm going to draw a baseline over the top of that, essentially from center point to center point, the beginning of the dimension to the end. And I'm going to draw two perpendicular lines away from that. And I'm going to offset that first line by my known dimension-- 1,293.9 feet. And then I'm simply going to run scale about that to scale that up to the appropriate size. Pretty simple stuff.

Then I can slide that underneath and change my site view to wireframe and quickly match these things up. And again, you're going to see that these things are not going to match up perfectly, but pretty darn close, OK? Definitely close enough for early design thinking.

So the last thing that I'm going to do is establish a location. And this is something that doesn't always happen in a Revit file, especially for students. I don't think students ever do this. But if I'm going to push this site to VR-- if I'm going to use this as my base file to create a VR template-- I need to make sure that I set my location because that's going to establish my latitude and longitude, that's going to establish my sun position when I push this to go live.

The final thing that I need to do to build this as a template-- and again, this is just a template. I want something in VR that I can start throwing parts into, different design ideas into. But Live will not work unless there's some base geometry. So to bring in that base geometry, to start some base geometry rather than build a building, I just build a couple of building pads in there. So I take a couple of the existing buildings, I outline their shapes so I know the base geometry that I build in FormIt. I know where to put those things.

Once I have my site-- and I don't know. I've heard arguments both ways on this. But typically, what I do next is I move my site to the origin. So looking at those building pads right now, they were 15 feet below. So I simply move the site 15 feet up and then adjust accordingly.

And those building pads, then, will give me some base geometry that will allow me to process this scene through GoLive. Once I have my scene processed through GoLive, I actually have a complete VR template.

So the last thing that I'm going to do is, underneath the site tools, use the subregion and block out the conceptual site that I'm working on. This gives me the specific location where I can toss different building ideas onto inside of VR. And note, I don't want to send this through GoLive, or Live, or Revit Live every single time I have a different design iteration, OK? So the idea behind this is I'm building a template, and then I'm going to be using 3ds Max Interactive to continue to throw and merge ideas on and look at them and evaluate them in VR.

So subregion-- different material to make sure it stands out so that once this is processed and I get my VR file back, I know exactly the location to be placing things. Pretty simple. That is a file that is now ready to push.

So the next step of this process is building some data. So again, I'm going to be using FormIt for this. Looking at location site weather, construction amassing, and creation of predesigned simulations.

So inside of FormIt, I need to repeat a few of these steps with FormIt. I'm talking with the FormIt team in particular about linking a few of these things up. If I have Revit at a location and [? FormIt at ?] a location, those things starting to sync up. I think that's probably coming in our near future. So whether it's a total speculation on my part, just knowing from those discussions what they're excited about, I think we'll be seeing that soon.

In particular with the weather stations close to the site, I'm really interested in wind because one of the key things that I think we all should be studying more as designers is wind and airflow, passive ventilation. And again, it's a really difficult concept both to study-- if we're going to be honest, we think we know how wind moves. We really don't. And it's an even more difficult concept to convey. So I'm going to grab that wind data as something that I want to keep for later, in particular for the months and time of year that I think it's going to be most relevant for passive ventilation.

Then I'm going to go through the process of importing the satellite image and do the finish import. From there, the process becomes pretty straightforward. I think if you've used FormIt at all, you've spent quite a bit of time doing this. Tracing out the overhead imagery, getting things, again, to line up approximately, and then extruding up.

One of the little hidden gems-- and this is the great thing about working in a university-- is on occasion, I get students that come up to me and say, did you know? And this happened recently with one of my students, Hunter, who said, did you know in Google Earth, you can check the height of most buildings? And so let's hop over to Google Earth really quick and we can take a look at how that happens. And again, approximate data, but pretty good data to be looking at.

So same site in Google Earth. And if you'll notice at the very bottom right, right down there, I have elevation above sea level. And I can hover over the sidewalk-- 510, over the building-- 545. And that immediately gives me a really rough estimate on exactly how much I should extrude that building. And because I'm an architect and don't do math, calculator-- minus 510-- height, 37 feet. Cool?

So pretty simple stuff. It even works, you know, if the building has a certain slope to the roof, something like that, I can actually grab those points. It's going to be consistent all the way across. So now I have an approximate height to bring that up. And essentially, we continue to go around building data.

In my Tuesday talk, I also have using photo modeling in FormIt. So if you go to my other talk and download the resources there, you can see how to use Street View, grab a snapshot of the front of the building, photo map that, and then basically trace out some context and continue the modeling process.

So here, I know early on in the process of architecture, I often at least have a vague idea of what my building program is. And what I always encourage my students to do is that's the time to start simulations, OK? If you're starting your simulations early, they can actually start informing what we're designing, not just responding to what we're designing.

So inside of FormIt, the key thing is to establish levels. I need to set levels, and that calls out that geometry as something to run the simulation on. Without levels, it doesn't know what to do. So that's simply then going into generate insight and then pulling up the insight tabs and starting to manipulate those. And we can see immediately feedback in terms of what manipulations I can do and what the impact is on my energy settings.

And so these are things that I want-- I'm looking for creative ways to explain this to a client. Creative ways to start conveying that information.

And the last thing that I'm always looking to do, especially in the Midwest, in St. Louis, gets a little bit hot. So I'm looking at the month of August and beginning to understand BTUs on a surface. And again, this is a great thing to convey to students. So British thermal units on a surface, this is-- and I ran the numbers just a little bit ago just because I felt like doing it. And it turned out, yeah, it's kind of funny how it turned out actually.

So to give you a basic understanding, a contextual understanding of a British thermal unit, a 100 watt incandescent light bulb-- which you can't really find anymore-- but a 100 watt incandescent light bulb is about 3.4 BTUs per watt. And that's like a 100 watt light bulb. That is a burn your hand kind of hot, OK?

So in August, when temperatures in St. Louis will melt your face, we have about 151 BTUs per square foot on a surface. So that gives us a total of 22,650 BTUs across the surface that is 50 feet long by 30 feet tall. So it's 1,500 square feet times 151, which gives us 226,500 BTUs, amounting to 666.1 incandescent watts in 100 watt incandescent bulbs across that surface. And the fact that it was 666 was ominous at best, I thought, in a month that could be hotter than hell because of the 0.1. So that's kind of where this is rolling.

Step three, creation of the VR template. And time is coming together OK, so I'm going to go ahead and let this play through. Even though I think this is going to change pretty drastically, I think this is still going to be in play for at least the next six to nine months as a basic method. So I've done some additional work on the site, including using subregions to define some basics of where the roads and sidewalks are. Going into my 3D view, my 3D isometric view, the first thing I'm going to do is use the section box. I don't want that much of the site.

And I will be honest, you know, I had students create all of this file in FormIt. It had all the buildings, things like that. That file got a little bit crazy. So I just sort of kept it simple with this, I didn't include a lot of the context in here. But the idea behind this would be we could have quite a bit of context coming in, merging that format file, bringing it to Revit, and including that in the template.

Before sending it to GoLive, I've got to make sure that my materials are set to realistic. It doesn't really like it if you have the section box turned on, but it'll work anyway. So I just always leave that one on. And hit the go button. At this point, it goes to the cloud, it comes back to you via email.

And then in interactive, you can change your project type from Stingray down to at bottom to load an LVSC. That is the native GoLive file type. And essentially, I can build a new template in interactive based entirely around that GoLive scene, which is really handy.

So I'm using that method. So this is simply saying I would like to save that into my design analytics folder. And we'll call it St. Louis site. So that's going to build all of the content for 3ds Max Interactive into that folder. It takes longer than this, this is about a five minute process. Just clipped that part of the video out.

And so I now have that site, and keep in mind this also brought in the sun position, latitude, and longitude, so all of that's going to be accurate. And I now have a scene that I can navigate real time that is ready to start dropping all different kinds of things into.

Also, if I run the test scene, that is going to pull up exactly what you would have seen in Live with the same interface and everything, including the VR button at the bottom right. So all that I have to do from here is simply click on that VR button if I have my VR headset hooked into my laptop, I'm ready to dive into this in a VR setting. So this is really convenient and really fast. And something that we were using quite a bit of as well, including dropping things into 3ds Max, adding animation, dropping it in, and then we could have animated objects inside of our GoLive files.

So moving forward with the design a few phases and responding to some of the environmental issues that we saw, reshaping the building a little bit still in a wildly early schematic setting. Just looking at some basic forms and enclosure ideas. I'm exporting this locally as an OBJ file. So far from the testing that we've done, the OBJ files work quite well in terms of pushing those into 3ds Max. And the reason I'm sending them to Max first is to make sure that things are lined up correctly, modify any textures that I would want to modify, and then often, like I said, a lot of times I'll be adding in some basic animation work inside of 3D Studio Max as well.

So the other thing that I'm doing in parallel with this as well is I'm going to take my Revit scene and save that out as an FBX file and open both of those files up into 3ds Max. Essentially, we're building two parallel scenes-- creating three parallel scenes at this point. One in Revit, one in 3ds Max, and one in FormIt, all of them really essentially sharing the same data.

So that's my Revit scene, I'm bringing that in first. Getting things, again, centered close to the origin. And then the last thing I'm going to do is import my OBJ file from FormIt. And again, of course, they don't come in correctly. But the scale factor, it's not that bad. OBJ files flip the XYZ coordinate, so that's simply a matter of rotating by 90 degrees-- with the rotation lock on, that's very helpful-- and scaling it up by the appropriate amount. So scale, lock in the numeric scale of 1,200. And again, position those two things together because, again, the goal is-- once all of these items start pushing their way into Interactive, I want things to line up and work correctly for me there.

Also, in FormIt, when you're tracing these things out, you're tracing them out on the XY plane. So the bottom of the buildings are always going to be, you know, on the zero axis in terms of z. They're going to be on the XY plane. So I'm using 3ds Max as well to go ahead and adjust their position. Adjust each building's position so that it's sitting correctly on a topography. I can do that.

You know, the other option you have is that I can take the geometry from Revit-- the topography. I can push that topography into FormIt as well. And I do that work in FormIt. 3ds Max is a little bit faster to me. Things stick together a little bit less in 3ds Max than they do in FormIt. FormIt's modeler likes to be a little bit sticky, which is a feature, but sometimes when you're moving things around, it can be a little bit of a flaw.

So getting all of those things roughly positioned, I'm then going to select each object and I'm going to link this scene to my open 3ds Max Interactive scene because I want those things to be able to share data. So I'm going to go Connect, select the three objects that I want to push to 3ds Max Interactive, and then say Send Selection because I don't want to send everything. I just want to send those buildings. I'm going to drop them into my data models folder, and then immediately inside of Interactive, it gives me the prompt to import. So again, I'm going to navigate to my models folder-- my data models folder inside of 3ds Max Interactive, and I will have my St. Louis objects to drop in place.

Cool? So from there, I can start making some modifications and start working through them and position things. There's a few more steps involved in that. I want to go ahead and move on to the next mode of simulation because this is the one that I found the most interesting to work through and I think is one of the most relevant in the class, and that is doing wind simulation.

So how many of you have used CFD in a class? One, maybe-- I might have seen two. Full disclosure, I'm not sure that CFD is completely ready for us as architects just yet, OK? I really struggled with portions of it. Some of the geometry that I built in FormIt and then would send to Revit to push to CFD would crash CFD. Some of the geometry that I would build in FormIt and then same process, when it got to CFD, it wouldn't run the simulation because of duplicated edges. Some things like that that are just sort of native to some of the architectural modeling processes.

So it's a little bit tricky. You have to sort of finagle it just a bit. But what I'm going to do is implore you all to start doing this because if we have more architects using tools like CFD, those things will get much better for us. I think it's right there, it's right on the cusp of working perfectly. And when it does work, it's absolute magic. It really is, and makes something really, really engaging.

So I'm going to be doing wind data, wind tunnel volume, Revit to CFD, the CFD simulation, and the creation of traces. Oh, and by the way, if you saw the cool augmented reality thing with the car and the traces around it on the show floor, it's a really similar technique that I'm going to walk through in terms of how to get those.

So again, this is the FormIt geometry that I wanted to test. Understanding the basics of wind flow in and out, not looking at that is one great big wind tunnel, but understanding that I would have only smaller operable parts of the glazing on different sizes. So I really had to strip a lot of the geometry that I was thinking about out of that model and remodel it in Revit as very simple geometric forms to get it working correctly.

The next thing is I need to model air, which kind of doesn't make sense, kind of does make sense. So I'm going to model the basic area that I want wind to happen within. So this is the larger bounding box on the outside, which is going to become, very literally, the volume of air in my 3D simulation. And I'm going to extrude that up to include the entirety of the building.

Cool, so I've got my building early predesign that I want to test, and I've got my wind volume. I'm going to go Finish Model. And then in the add-ins, once you have CFD installed and Revit installed, you're going to see Launch Active Model.

So inside a CFD-- which is computational fluid dynamics, by the way, for those of you new to it-- I basically have my Revit model broken down into some pieces. That generic model I'm turning into air, essentially, and I'm setting it as a set of values. Everything else, I don't know what material it is just yet, but I do know it's going to be solid, so I'm simply going to set it to concrete. So now I know wind air is not going to pass through those.

Next, I need to establish my boundary conditions. On one side, I want to set a wind speed. So it's going to be set to velocity. And going back to that wind rose, an average velocity of about 10 miles per hour. The other side of the wind volume, I don't want a velocity. I simply want a pressure of zero. And that's going to let the simulation know that I want air to pass right through that. So air is going to start on one side, hit the building, and pass through the last part.

So what I'm going to do next is Run Simulation. And just in doing this a couple of times, a really good number of iterations to run is about 300. What you're going to see is this is going to reinterpret the mesh, and it's going to start building a chart that shows you every iteration on the simulation. And this chart, the graph-- what you actually are looking for are all the lines not to converge, but to level out on basically-- I'm not sure if it's an XZ but across this table. So you're going to see there's a lot of difference in the early iterations.

And what CFD is looking for is each iteration becoming a little bit more common, a little bit more similar, until those things level out. So 100 doesn't quite do it, and I did skip a big chunk of time there in the middle. 100 doesn't quite do it, but it's really close. Certainly close enough for what I wanted to do with this presentation. Right away, you can see I now have a new list of parts that are represented in the simulation. So I'm turning everything to wireframe. So I can see through it clearly in terms of how it's represented.

And the first thing I'm going to do is place a plane into this. Now unlike some of the other simulations that I've done, like flow, this no longer needs to continue running the simulation. It's not processing in real time, it's already been processed. So this is simply now representation. So I can move that plane anywhere through the building and see the wind flow.

So one of the things I could do with that is, again, do a screen capture or a rendering of that and push that into my VR. But the thing that's more interesting to see are the flow lines. In particular, I want to walk in with those flow lines around me using VR so I can communicate that as really valuable data to a client.

And the navigation in CFD is sketchy too. It's the grab and rotate around rather than orbit, so that takes a little while to get used to. So if you notice, I have to use the view cube on the top right.

So with that plane established and positioned, I'm going to do traces. And I set the density of traces-- that's the first step is the density. I'm going to set that to two. I'm going to draw a baseline across and another line going up. And if you catch it, you will see a little bit about what I was talking about with CFD. Crashed, I restarted. Restarted, I still have the data, everything was still valid. Reran it again and I have the traces.

OK, so this is really complex, dense data, though. I mean, I can see it because I know what those spaces are and I understand what's happening inside of that. That's valuable information for me. If I were to show that to a client, I am not sure that they would be able to pull really much of anything out of that at all. So inside of CFD, there is a plugin that you can install that will allow you to export those traces as an FBX file.

So then the process that I used was to export these traces as an FBX file. And again, I used 3ds Max. I brought the traces in, I brought my Revit file in, and lined those two things up again. Which is a few minutes worth of work, but really nothing serious at all.

So last step, data to VR. So I had my Insight file. So I've exported that as a JPEG file now at this point. So essentially, I've got something that I can make a large billboard for. I had my BTUs per surface, so I actually want to come back in and do a BTU on my new surface on the south side with a larger overhang to be able to communicate that. So I've got these two wildly different BTU readings for the month of August. Or actually, this is July on this pass.

And what I'm going to do here, again, there isn't a way that I found yet to export this as a higher resolution JPEG file. So I'm simply using Print Screen again and bringing that in Photoshop. So Print Screen, Clipboard, Create, Edit, Paste, Crop, and then I'm going to pull that image out of perspective.

And the other thing that I want to make sure that I'm doing with this after I pull it out of perspective is I want to make sure that I have something that equates the BTU reading on the image itself. So the last step that I'm going to do with creating what's going to become a texture map is to actually put that BTU graph on this as well. So simply using Edit, Distort to pull that out of perspective, and now I'm going to copy the graph right here onto my base image file. And again, essentially what I'm looking to do is just create these larger billboards that can be viewed in VR in context.

So we'll save this out to my texture map folder that I had built for this project. And I'm going to start putting all of these files together inside of 3ds Max, So you can see one of the things that I've already done, I've brought in my simulation data from Insight. That was a JPEG. And just, again, made a large billboard. It looks much higher resolution than that outside of 3ds Max because they have all of those set to run fast. I'm going to copy over this as a duplicate.

And in the background, you can see the Revit file and the wind simulation file that I paired up. I'm going to use a standard map. And again, in Interactive, there are better ways to get maps built. The DirectX file type or format is going to build a better texture map for you. The standard map is the easiest one to use, though. They push through really cleanly, they're going to work really well as long as you're going to not worry too much about fidelity. You know, if I'm just trying to keep things representational, the standard maps push through perfectly. So I'm going to grab that BTU surface and then apply that map to that object.

So from there, I've got a really similar process again. I have my new geometry and I have my 3ds Max Interactive scene running in the background. And all that I need to do is select my new geometry and push that over to the 3ds Max Interactive file. And so in this case in particular, just simply updating the file or overwriting the file. And then once I click Import, it's going to duplicate those pieces and bring them all in in the right spot, and they'll all remember their location.

So at this point, I have something fully navigable that I can move around in. As you can see, I can see all of the texture maps much more clearly than I could in 3ds Max. And again, once I have the basics put together, this is ready both to export directly out of 3ds Max Interactive, or what I find myself doing a lot of times is, why export it? I'm just going to use the Play button on the top left and jump right into VR to start viewing these files.

So that brings up the basic scene. And again, all of the tools, all the viewing tools from Live, are available to navigate around. Tap and go on the fly. The most relevant one to me, then, is really to move right into VR just sort of with a single click and start navigating through this as well.

One thing to note since I only use the basic topography, if you have additional elements, every now and then, things will get dropped. There won't be like a second level to navigate to, things like that. So on occasion, you do need to build or copy elements in 3ds Max Interactive to make sure that you can navigate to new spots as you bring things in.

This is simply switching over to the VR headset. And this goes a little bit shaky cam, sorry, because it's not actually tracking the headset. And now this is completely ready to activate and move through VR.

And that's-- I'm going to continue to let this play. There's one more portion at the end, which is backing out of VR. I can reestablish and reset shade and shadow any time of day or any month, any particular time out of the year. I would love to be able to see that happen in VR so that you don't have to leave it, but right now, that's not available.

If any of you have used Google Earth VR, that version-- it's tremendous. You just click in the sky and you can just drag the sun all the way around, all the way back to the stars, and all the way back up in the morning. It's really, really a tremendous tool to be able to visualize shade and shadow while you're inside of VR.

The last point to make in terms of viewing this is actually moving into these trace lines is a completely different experience. Seeing these trace lines around you in VR is really interesting. You get a much better idea of where and how they're moving, how they're moving around you. The notion of us moving more to systems of passive ventilation I think is very relevant. And then understanding how we need to shape buildings to control wind flow around is also increasingly relevant.

Yeah, that's the basics of what I've got for you. So thank you all very much for attending. This is going to conclude, the video will conclude with showing date and sun locations. But that's the information. That's that. Thank you all. Happy to take questions.

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