Rhino vs. Forma? No, Rhino + Forma!

KEVIN WALSH: Hello. I'm Kevin, an architect at Nikken Sekkei in Tokyo.

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: And I'm Krzys. I'm sitting on the product manager side at Autodesk Forma.

KEVIN WALSH: Today, we're going to discuss not Rhino versus Forma, but Rhino plus Forma and how to take advantage of the best aspects of both. We have some learning objectives here. But in effect, what Krzys and I are going to do is introduce ourselves, describe Rhino and Forma, and then give some demonstrations of workflows using both. And I'll finish up with how we're using them together in my company. Let's kick things off with a question. Krzys, do you know what this is?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: This looks like a shadow diagram?

KEVIN WALSH: That's right. It's a shadow diagram. But can you identify the location?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: Judging by the massive sphere on the top, I think it's a Las Vegas site.

KEVIN WALSH: Yeah, if I show you the 3D model, you can be sure. But you're right. It's the Venetian Hotel, where we're going to be staying this November for the AU. Now here's my real question, can you spot anything wrong with this diagram?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: Actually, not really. What's wrong here?

KEVIN WALSH: Let me show you. If this direction is north, which it is, these shadows don't make sense. If we correct the north direction, the shadows are totally different. Now, although we don't usually get it wrong by a full 90 degrees like this, this is an example of a typical mistake that can happen when you're doing shadow analysis. I've got another question for you. This is a sun hours diagram of the neighborhood around my office here in Tokyo. Can you see anything wrong with it?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: No, not at first glance.

KEVIN WALSH: Right. If you were from Japan, you'd probably spot the issue straight away. So let me explain. The weather files for these diagrams come from onebuilding.org. This is an online repository of global weather data. Now, if you were to pick a location for Tokyo, you might be tempted to just go with the first one on the list that doesn't seem to be on a beach.

However, that would be a pretty big mistake. The place you'd end up picking, Chichijima, is as far from Central Tokyo as Las Vegas is from Oregon. Even though it's technically part of Tokyo's administrative region, it's a completely different latitude and climate zone from Tokyo. It would be better to choose this one, Chiyoda, right in the middle of the city near my office. So if I correct the location data, you can see how different the shadows become. This building in the middle is the headquarters of my office at Nikken Sekkei in Tokyo.

Let me take a moment to introduce the company. We handle a range of projects globally and in Japan. On the left here is the Tokyo Skytree, which is the tallest structure in Japan and the third tallest structure in the world. In the middle is a project in Suzhou in China. And we're just wrapping up construction on this pair of towers on the right in Dubai, linked by this cantilever bridge.

Nikken Sekkei has a long history. The studio has been operating continuously under various names since 1900. In the 2000s, we began expanding our international footprint. Just to give you a perspective on our scale, we generally rank among the top five architecture firms globally. We have branch offices throughout China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. We're also in the middle of construction of our first major European project, the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona.

As for me, you may have gathered from my accent that I'm not Japanese. I'm from Galway in the West of Ireland. I'm not quite sure how I ended up in Tokyo. But during my seven years at Nikken Sekkei, I've been lucky enough to work on projects across the Middle East, Asia, and Russia. Krzys, I have one more question for you. We're looking here at a comparison of annual temperatures between Tokyo and Las Vegas, where we'll be in November. Does anything about these charts strike you as problematic, especially if you're going to show these to a client?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: At first glance, they look very, very similar. But the thing that strikes me as a little bit weird is the scale on the left, which is that they are starting at a different point.

KEVIN WALSH: That's exactly right, Krzys And I see this mistake all the time. It drives me crazy. If you match the y-axis scales properly, you can see that it actually gets much colder in Las Vegas compared to Tokyo, even though the maximum temperature is about the same. But there's another issue with these diagrams. Do you see what it is?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: For me, as a person living in Norway, the temperature of 30 degrees is quite high. But other than that.

KEVIN WALSH: Yeah, well, it is related to that. This is the real issue here, if we plot the maximum temperatures from the year just gone past, we see that it's literally off the charts for both cities. Now, this isn't a software glitch. This is obviously a much larger problem. We're currently going through summer temperatures that are well outside the roughly 30-year window of historical data that we use to base a lot of our environmental simulations on.

So this is the obligatory slide, where we talk about corporate goals and environmental commitments. Nikken Sekkei declared a climate emergency in 2021 and committed to being carbon neutral by 2050. And every year, we update a road map of how we're progressing towards that. Most of you watching, your own companies will have made similar commitments. But they often seem very abstract and hard to relate to in terms of individual actions.

I'm particularly interested in how those of us without a chief in our titles can contribute. I'm not a chief executive, or a chief financial officer, or a chief technology officer. But I am an architect. And I've been focusing on the area where I think I can make an impact, which is reducing carbon emissions from the buildings we design.

I want to get into the relationship of CO2 emissions to the design process. If you can excuse this rough sketch, what I've drawn here is a timeline with these bars indicating when decisions get made and their impacts on CO2. We can say that decisions impacting a building's carbon emissions are made throughout the design process.

Let's say this line represents an average building's total emissions. There's research that indicates that sustainably designed buildings emit 34% less carbon than other buildings. From this, we can say that, conservatively, there is at least a 34% window of opportunity for reducing carbon emissions by how we design our buildings.

These are examples of design decisions that have an effect on CO2 emissions, decisions made both early and later in the design process. For example, choosing a structural system is often an early stage design decision, while selecting finishing materials might come later. An HVAC system plays a significant role in the building's operational emissions. And important aspects of it might not be decided until halfway through construction. So looking at it this way, it's hard to make a distinction between the relative importance of when these decisions get made.

However, we can divide these decisions into qualitative versus quantitative decisions. For example, the efficiency of the HVAC system is a qualitative decision. It will vary between products and manufacturers. The CO2 emissions of the concrete specified is also a qualitative decision that we decide when we pick which concrete to use. Similarly, the distance stone is transported, the insulation material used and its FAR value, the type of glazing chosen for windows, these are all related to the inherent properties of the systems or materials selected.

As we get more sophisticated in terms of carbon calculation, as our systems get more efficient and as clients push us to make sure we choose the best available products, the relative importance of these qualitative decisions will reduce because the solution is going to become clearer. What remains are the quantitative decisions, like how big is the building? How much glass is used in the facade? What is the compactness ratio? How many columns and beams are there?

Interestingly, these decisions are often made early in the design process, which is where I do most of my work. Because of the nature of overseas projects that I work on, I spend a lot of my time on early stage design, focused primarily on pre-concept and concept design stages. So while I may not hold a senior position in the company, the scope of my work allows me to exert what I think of as a disproportionately large impact on our project's carbon footprints.

So in short, reducing carbon in our designs is easiest early in the design process. How do we do this? Now I just want to briefly touch on the most common tools we use for early stage design. In our studio, Rhino is the main tool for early stage modeling. First, it's user friendly. You don't have to be an expert to get around it. Second, it allows for intricate geometry, while still maintaining a high level of accuracy Rhino is also versatile, supporting multiple import and export options. These are all very useful for us.

An additional benefit is its integrated visual scripting language called Grasshopper. This has a wide array of uses, such as automation and parametric design. Grasshopper lets us develop specific tools for individual projects, as well as reusable ones across multiple projects. It also allows us to do quick iterations creating and testing design options efficiently. And it has its own extensive ecosystem of plugins.

One valuable plugin within Grasshopper that we use is called Ladybug, an extensive open source project that can be used for lots of different environmental analyzes. While it is very flexible and customizable, Ladybug is complex, even for those who are Grasshopper experts. It's open source and endlessly customizable. But unfortunately, each point where a user can modify it is a point where a mistake can be introduced. All the questions I've been asking Krzys earlier are based on common Ladybug errors. So as you can see, it's easy for designers to make mistakes if they're not careful.

This challenge of scaling early stage environmental analysis in a large studio like ours is something I think about a lot. Currently, within the design teams, only a handful of us are equipped to conduct these specialized studies. So what kind of impact are we really able to make at scale? This brings me to Spacemaker. I was first introduced to Spacemaker at the AU in New Orleans last year. Until then, the software was primarily used in Europe. And I'd only really heard the name.

During one of the presentations, the term analysis platform was used to describe it. So this term actually really got my interest. And I started to think that this could be a solution to the problem of scaling expertise that I'd been thinking about. Spacemaker minimized the risk of errors. For example you couldn't go wrong with the location, or the north direction, or the type of analysis. It was also fairly straightforward to use, even for those who weren't really that good at 3D modeling.

Once I got back to Tokyo, then I started experimenting with it. And while it showed promise, I quickly discovered that it didn't integrate very well with Rhino. Rhino is really compatible with lots of other software, as I said. But Spacemaker came from a different place in terms of how it handled geometry and coordinates, especially making import and export tasks a real challenge. This was a big problem for us because we use Rhino so much.

The team at Spacemaker was actually quite helpful in trying to get to the bottom of these integration challenges with me. I had lots of conversations with customer service and technical departments. And eventually, I was put in touch with Krzys, who is going to take over now and tell us a little about himself and about the successor to Spacemaker, Forma.

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: Thank you, Kevin. Rhino has been very close to my heart for a very, very long time. And this is very much linked to who I am. And it's my professional journey. Currently, I hold the position of Senior Product Manager for Autodesk Forma. But I actually come from industry. I come from a very similar place where-- to Kevin, which is that I've started as an architect. So I was very much into the design, early stage design process using tools like Rhino, Grasshopper, Ladybug.

And then, I transitioned more into a computational designer role, focusing almost purely on Grasshopper, Dynamo, Python, C#, and basically scaling the tools within my architectural office. And then, my journey from there was basically towards scaling, scaling what I knew and how to apply technology to design practices.

I became a project manager for a consultancy that was basically doing custom development and workflow consultation for biggest architectural offices in the world. And in the end, I ended up being a product manager of where I am now within Autodesk Forma, where I'm mainly-- daily, basically, deal with the idea of interconnecting different tools and developing just different workflows and different tools that can come together as basically a web of solutions.

I come from Poland. And I transitioned towards Norway quite a while ago. I've actually lived in more than seven countries. But it's a longer story. I wanted to tell you guys a little bit about Autodesk Forma, since only Spacemaker name has been mentioned until now. And the reason for that is that the Autodesk Forma is a project that was launched fairly recently in May, actually, of 2023.

The effort is being developed by something that was Spacemaker team in the past. But it's much greater than the Spacemaker initial vision and the initial startup that was purchased at-- by Autodesk about three years ago. The vision that you're going to hear a lot during this year is very much about creating a web platform that's going to connect, basically, all stages of the design, starting from planning, going through design, construction, and ending in operation.

And it's a great, great journey that will probably take a lot of years. But something that I really love about this graph and something that I just wanted to highlight is that the vision itself is not a product. It's basically a net or basically a wireframe for different solutions. So in this graph, we can see a lot of hexagons that are being placed on top of this throughout the different parts of the design.

And the idea here is that, basically, some of those functionalities, some of those capabilities, we are creating ourselves at Autodesk. But more of them are being created by the community and by other softwares. So this is very much aligned with the topic of today's presentation, which is Rhino, which is one of the dominant softwares within the field.

What we can see here is a diagram of what native capabilities of Forma are and how the software is being used. These capabilities are very much aligned with what Spacemaker was in the past. And the reason for that is when creating the new platform, when creating Forma, the first capabilities that we put on top of the platform were Spacemaker capabilities and Forma capabilities and bringing them together into one.

The three parts of the software, the three main sets of capabilities that we see, are basically contextual data, design automation, and analysis. So the idea is that the user can very easily create the product with surrounding data roads, parcels. Then on top of the created projects that are already georeferenced, so you know where in space you are, you're being able to very easily model masses and generate sites-- site optimization.

And then on top of this, the final element is the environmental analysis piece, which basically allows you to optimize and also analyze what you've designed in the second step within the authoring environment. And where this journey becomes extremely interesting, and this is actually the majority of my time in Forma, is actually the ecosystem. So basically, creating an open platform. Not only capabilities, but actually connecting with other softwares and allowing others to being able to build on top of the platform with APIs.

So we are imagining, basically, each of those blocks being extendable throughout the APIs. And for example, within the contextual data, there is a data marketplace concept where users can bring their own data. Or data providers can resell the GIS data to the users within design and automation.

The scene is very large. And it's larger than Autodesk. And we are very much embracing the concept of different softwares working together and authoring geometry within our environment. And it's the same for analysis. So we are imagining, as we are already seeing people building custom environmental analysis for our platform for this, basically, become this long-term vision that it has to become.

The Rhino integration was quite a natural step for us to take within this vision, as mentioned, because of my passion for Rhino, because of my history, but also because of the request that we were getting from users. We knew that there was something within the space. And basically, when we were contacted with Kevin, we decided to start experimenting with the concepts. Kevin, could you walk us through your memories, basically, on that piece of functionality?

KEVIN WALSH: Right. Yeah, maybe the second time I spoke with Krzys, he mentioned that he had this Grasshopper plugin for pushing things to Spacemaker, which got me really interested because I spent 1/2 of my day in Grasshopper, usually. So he shared it, the early plugin, with me. And it was really raw. But it was promising.

To get it to work, I had to go into this Developer tab in Google Chrome and manually copy this authentication code here, and then paste it into a Grasshopper panel, run a script, and then refresh the browser. And despite this makeshift process, the program, successfully, it moved an object directly into Spacemaker from Grasshopper.

Now, this might sound pretty basic. But given our past struggles with getting things into Spacemaker, it was clear to me, at least, that this was a breakthrough. It's not perfect yet. But it was a real sign that something significant was taking shape. Yeah, so now Krzys, I think, is going to show us what that became, the Rhino Forma plugin.

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, absolutely. So how the plugin looks today is a little bit different. And it's much easier than what Kevin was working with at the time. What I wanted to walk you guys through is, basically, the very short introduction to Forma, or at least to the Rhino plugin workflow where, as you remember, there were three parts. There was a data part. There was a modeling part. And there was an analysis part.

So here, you can see the process of purchasing data. We're actually getting this from three sources, from OpenStreetMap, if I remember correctly. Then getting stuff like parcels, setting up, what is your site? So specifying, which plots are we going to be working on? And then finally, inserting the buildings into the scenes that have been downloaded from the GIS sources that are connected to Forma.

In that way, we can basically, within seconds-- or in this case, within, I think, one minute, we are being able to set up the scene and start working on our early stage project. So the second stage, modeling, actually, in this case, takes part in this extended client. So in this case, Rhino. So what we are doing is, basically, we are connecting our Forma product into Rhino. And in this part, we are aligning, basically, the site with the Rhino project. We can see the overlay of what is already in Forma.

We can, inform, basically our modeling decisions within Rhino. And we are able to do something very simple within this environment and push it to Forma. Since I'm not a computational designer anymore, I do not dare to do anything with Grasshopper. So what I'm doing here is basically just pushing a couple of boxes. And one interesting thing is that you can basically see how it's just pops in a Forma environment. And it also populates the data, such as the area of the floors. That is representing the box that we just pushed.

KEVIN WALSH: Right. So Krzys just showed how to bring a box into Forma. But for my subsequent demonstrations, I want to have a box of specific dimensions that I can use as a baseline building to compare designs with. A baseline design, it usually shares key attributes with the actual designs you're studying, like GFA, number of floors, usable plan depth.

And so I'm going to ask Krzys to-- in Forma-- and maybe in the Las Vegas model that we've prepared and we're going to show in-- when we're live in Las Vegas. But in Forma, can you create a baseline building design? Basically, a box like this, but with a ground floor that covers about 60% of the site area. And all the other floors should be 18 meters wide and 200 meters long. And well, the key thing is the FAR should be four. So maybe, Krzys, you can talk us through that process.

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: Absolutely. And for this type of task, for creating very simple mask modeling, Forma Design Client is actually very, very efficient when it comes down to creating such stuff, since we have a set of integrated modeling tools, but also set of, basically, data tools that are giving you feedback on the coverage of your sites and about square meters that you have within the site.

So what I'm doing here is basically creating the building in a very, very quick manner, trying to hit the right objectives that you just described. So I'm just playing around and trying to get 0.6 area coverage and then very easily being able to create a box. And that will have basically enough floor area to cover these four panel points, zero FAR requirement that you've mentioned.

Since this is basically-- we have domain knowledge, we are able to operate on the concepts such as floors. So users within-- without Grasshopper scripts are being able to basically numerically insert, how many floors do they wish to see within their building up until the point that the criteria is met? I believe that's the end result. You can take further, Kevin.

KEVIN WALSH: That's right. That looks exactly right. And it is pretty fast. So I'm going to go through a similar process here, but with Grasshopper. So let's say that's the baseline building there in Forma on the left. But I'm going to set up a new proposal in Forma and then do some modeling in Rhino. I don't know if I'm quite as quick. But if I use Grasshopper, I can do something that's about the same speed as what Krzys just did for us in Forma.

So at the moment, I'm just setting the correct proposal for the plugin. And now I'm going to start modeling on this layer four. So with Grasshopper running in the background, it's automatically cutting the floor plates and calculating the FAR, as you can see. So this is a tool we use a lot in the office. So I'm just going to keep modeling and copying this geometry on this layer. And you can see the FAR is updating like that. So it's quite intuitive just to keep adding geometry until we reach the FAR of four.

So now I'm at BCA of 60, which is what we want. And I'm just going to start moving these points up until I hit an FAR of four. And once I do, I'm going to copy this geometry onto a specific layer that we're using to push geometry to Forma. So I'll just copy it to the layer. And I got the Rhino plugin window and just hit Push. It's really quite simple. And generally, depending on the complexity of the geometry, it takes about 10 seconds for this. This is real-time at the moment.

And then, we go to Forma and refresh the window, same as Krzys just showed us. So once that has reloaded, we can see our geometry is brought into Forma. And I'm just going to run a sunlight analysis for the summer equinox of this massing study. So I'm going to do two more studies now in Rhino.

First off, I'm going to just make a new proposal in Forma and then go back to Rhino and archive this geometry that I've just-- I've already made and start a new study. So what I'm going to do is switch to 2D so I can start drawing here. This is sped up a little bit. So it looks like I'm really good at drawing. I'm not really this good at drawing. But I'm definitely better at drawing in Rhino than I am in Forma. I don't really know how to draw in Forma the way Krzys just showed us.

But the beauty of it is I don't really need to know how to. I already know how to do it in Rhino. And I'm just going to do it in Rhino and then use Forma for the things I know I can do in Forma. So I'm just generating some 2D shapes here in Rhino. And I'm going to go into 3D and start extruding them now.

And the Grasshopper script is still running. So I'm getting feedback on the FAR. And I'll just make a podium here. And I'm going to try something slightly different with the towers this time. Maybe the central tower will be the tallest. Let's do it that way. And I'll extrude this tower down. And I'll just adjust the massing slightly so that it's a bit more sculptural.

And this is hitting the right FAR now. But I'm not really quite happy with the proportions. So I'll just keep adjusting, move this down, move this up, that kind of thing. So once it's something I'm happy with, once again, move this geometry onto the layer we use to push to Forma. And I'll go over to Forma and just hit Push again. So this is sped up slightly so we can get through the presentation.

And then in Forma, I'm going to run the analysis once more. Same sunlight analysis. And now I'm just going to jump back. I'll make another proposal in Forma and then jump back into Rhino once more. And this is sped up quite a bit here. But what I'm going to do is just flip that design we just made and maybe adjust the towers so that it's something a little bit different.

What I want to get is a variety of massing on the side so I can start to see different effects. So that's the right FAR now. I'm going to send that over to Forma once more. And once that's gone into Forma, I'm going to hit the analysis again. And once that's running, I'm going to full screen Forma. And I'm going to show you guys the Compare tool, which is on the left here below the Library window and the Compare window. Yeah, so there's compare.

And this is a really useful tool, basically, for looking at your design proposal, I think up to four proposals side-by-side. You can see on the left here, there's a list of all the proposals and the analysis you've run. So you can just drag and drop those over. And the pan and zoom moves together. So it's quite a quick way of comparing the different designs.

Maybe we can see just by looking at this that there's some significant shadows there cast by the building to the south of the site. So we might want to avoid putting towers into that shadow. And also, maybe the design on the left and the design second from the right maybe casts significant shadows to the north of the site. So maybe we don't want to close off our form completely like that. We might maybe want to make it a bit more open, like the second from the left. So you can see that we can get some meaningful analysis back out of Forma quite quickly.

Now I'm just going to jump back into Rhino after I make some quick empty proposals here in Forma. I'm going to show you some more complicated geometry that we can do in Rhino and bring into Forma, even though we probably could not natively build this kind of stuff in Forma. This is a box with some spheres subtracted out of it. Krzys asked me to make something with spheres.

So once we-- I think this is a pretty complicated shape. And it took some time to send it to Forma. This is skipped-- sped up and edited a little here. But this is a second idea here of some kind of ribbon shape. So how this is handled is each floor is a separate object. And it's triangulated, as you can see. So that was how we got that into Forma.

And then, there's a third design I just want to show you here, which is a conical form on stilts. So this shape was cut by floor plate, and then extruded, and then sent to Forma. So what I'm going to do now in Forma is use the Compare tool once again, just to-- first off, I'm going to run analyze on each of these strange shapes or strange forms. So I just cycle through these.

And once these are done analyzing, I'm going to go back into the Compare tool and try them over there. See, this is that ribbon-shaped option. And here is the subtracted spherical option and this conical option. And I think we'll put in the baseline building again, just so we have something to compare it with.

So in 3D, maybe on the leftmost option, you can see some triangle mesh artifacts, artifacts where this Forma maybe had a little bit of trouble with the meshing. But we're still able to get a meaningful analysis. Even this very strange subtracted sphere option, we can see that it avoids maybe the dark shadows at the south of the site behind that building, as does the conical option. So you can see that there's a relatively fast workflow to get even complex geometry out of Rhino and directly into Forma, where we can start doing analysis quite quickly.

So now I want to shift our focus to a feature in Forma that, as far as I know, is pretty much unavailable for Rhino and Grasshopper users. It's the rapid AI wind analysis. This is how it works in Forma. You basically get real-time feedback on a building form as you move it around or change its shape. I'm going to show a workflow now that combines this with some useful features of Grasshopper.

So what I'm going to do is use Grasshopper to define the parameters of a building form first. So what I'm going to do is create this radial figure, which is actually defined by some points that are in the Grasshopper-- that are in the Rhino model space. You can see, if I just move these around manually, I'm changing this radial figure. And this figure then becomes like a skeleton for the plan shape. Maybe in Las Vegas, there's a lot of y-shaped hotels. So this might be a hotel design. So you can see, moving the points around changes the plan shape.

This is also linked to the three-dimensional form. If it's a real building, it's going to have a real FAR requirement. So we could say it's an FAR of two for this design. So what that basically means is if we make the plan shape quite large, I'm stretching out these points like this, the max FAR is hit by a lower number of floors.

So we could say maybe 14 floors when we got this really big plan. But if we pull these points closer together, we make the plan smaller. So the building gets taller. And if we keep pulling them together, we get an even taller building, to the point where if they're quite close together, we get this small floor plate, but this very tall, slender building.

So what I'm going to show you now is how we can link all this to one parameter so that we can explore the position of the building on the side, but also the size of the floor plan and the building height, just by moving the slider and these points traveling along these paths, as you can see here. So just by moving this slider, we're animating the building like this. And that's also, of course, updating in 3D like this.

So we want to get this into Forma. The best way to bring things into Forma is to have a nice clean mesh because you don't want to have any errors in the wind analysis. But also, it'll just be faster. So I've set up this part of the Grasshopper script that will convert the NURBS curves of the Rhino geometry into a nice clean quad mesh, like this. And we can change the resolution if we need to. But I think a resolution of five seems to be just fine.

The next step I'm going to show you is how we're going to split up this kind of animation into discrete steps. And these are going to be-- these discrete steps are what we're going to send to Forma. So we're going to send maybe eight steps. This can be whatever we want. But for this demo, we're going to use eight steps.

And this red component here is the key part of this script. It opens the Forma window in a new browser window. So I just copy/paste the correct Forma project URL in there. And once I hit this Open Forma button, it will open a new Chrome browser window. This part of the script is baking automatically into the Rhino environment. So the geometry is on the layer. We just need to open Forma and see if it's there.

And actually, it's not because I forgot to hit this button here. You got to hit Push Continuously. So this is going to be pushing whatever is on that layer continuously to Forma. Quite useful. So I hit the button again. It's still not there because it's not finished loading. I have to wait for it to finish loading here. Now it's done. So I'm going to hit Open Forma one more time. And fingers crossed it is there now. I see. Yeah, there it is. So that was real-time. It took about 10 seconds, maybe less, to send.

So I'll go to the next step. And I'll wait for it to load this time. Once it's done loading, I'll hit this Open Forma button again. And it opens a new window. And there's the next iteration of that animation. So now I'm going to go through the remaining steps. The video is a bit sped up here, just to save time. But you can see I'm just cycling through next step. And then, once it's finished loading, I'm hitting Open Forma, which is opening a new browser window.

And once I've done that six more times, I've cycled through all the steps of the animation that I want to send. I'm going to full screen Forma. So what I have here is a bunch of browser windows all open with different instances of the animation I sent from Grasshopper. And just by doing Control-Tab, I can cycle through these browser windows.

What I'm going to do is cycle through and turn on the wind analysis, the rapid AI wind analysis, for each option. And this is quite fast. You can see it's up and running for this option already. And now what I'm going to do is set pre-save view for each option, just so that I can compare them all together from the same viewpoint.

And then if I cycle through, you can see I'm already getting some kind of meaningful feedback on how the design changes affect the wind on the site. If I go to a plan view and reset the north orientation for each option, it's maybe even more useful. Cycling through, you can see, maybe when the plan gets bigger and the building gets lower, these red areas indicate that pedestrian comfort is reduced in those areas or maybe just not a nice place to walk around.

So what I'm doing here is I'm setting the direction rather than the comfort for the wind analysis and the directions from the north. And it seems like there's no issues really with north wind on this design. But I noticed that there is also some strong winds from the Southwest. So I'm going to cycle through each and set for Southwest, and then have a look and see what the effect is.

And it turns out that the Southwest wind does have a bigger effect on our design, particularly maybe at that north tip of the building. But also where-- when the building is close to the neighboring building to the south, we seem to get a wind tunnel effect. So you can see, it's possible to get some meaningful analysis back quite quickly on designs from a point of view of when that we really couldn't have been able to do just with Rhino and Grasshopper alone.

So to sum up, what we've outlined here is a way to use Rhino and Grasshopper to map the design space within specific parameters and then explore a subset of that space in the context of wind comfort using Forma and rapid AI wind analysis. So now that I've shown you some basic and not so basic workflows, let's discuss how we share those skills across a company.

In a typical design office, there is a diverse range of skills within the team. Some people may be novice users who are only able to do basic massing, while others can handle more intricate tasks like designing building facades. You may also have team members able to use Grasshopper who are good at scripting or maybe one or two who can do environmental analysis using Ladybug or some other software, while we all want to do is leverage these varying skill sets to maximize our team's outputs and enhance project quality.

I've alluded to this earlier, but I just want to restate this central problem of scalability in the context of a large design studio. Usually, you'll find that skill distribution varies from team-to-team. Sometimes, only one team has the capability to conduct early stage environmental analysis. And this creates a bottleneck, as everyone starts relying on a single individual or a single team for all the analysis work.

The real risk here is that crucial analysis might be postponed or ignored altogether, missing out on the opportunity to refine the design at the early stage. So the promise of Forma is to eliminate this bottleneck, enabling all teams to conduct these analyzes early in the process without any obstacles or impediments. Introducing Forma into our office is being done through a phased implementation strategy. And we're collaborating with the Forma team to host training seminars. And we're in the process of developing workflow documentation.

In the beginning, I started off testing in Spacemaker. And then, I shared the progress with a colleague in our urban design team, who started using it on a pilot project. And now it's been rolled out to the global design team, where I work. We've been waiting for suitable projects to come along. And now that several of these projects have started, we're expecting to begin using it more extensively from now on. I had a lot of one-on-one contact and training with the Spacemaker team and then the Forma team. And once we started rolling it out to more users, we got an introduction from Simon in format to the software.

And Krzys also introduced the Rhino plugin to my team. As we move forward, we're going to be setting up more hands-on training sessions that are more specific to the global projects we work on, where, for example, we'll often be starting with a site in a large master plan, where there's no context available. And we need to go through uploading geography in neighboring buildings. So it's good to know specifically what that will be.

And we're also developing documentation to help users within the company. Initially, I started off making an evaluation document, which was basically a list of all the analyzes available. But now that most of us are-- or more of us have started using Forma, we've got an internal website, where we share tips and ask questions. And we're also collecting and documenting the workflows constantly. That's going to become the basis of a workflow library later on. And further down the line, we're going to start looking into API connections and other research areas, something Krzys alluded to earlier.

One more thing that we do is we're using Forma's capabilities beyond environmental analysis as a way to get users more comfortable working within it and more likely to use it. For instance, some of our novice users who are accustomed to using Rhino for area checks have been able to use Forma. As you can see from Krzys' demo earlier, it's quite easy to use for simple building shapes.

People with a bit more skill are able to use Forma to visualize and share visualizations of the site constraints. And more experienced users are using features like parking analysis. And we're also exploring the use of Forma as an alternate pathway to get designs into Revit, which it's always good to have lots of different routes to get there.

In my narrow focus, this is about getting my colleagues to the point where they're as comfortable in Forma as they are in Rhino and, thereby, able to make full use of the analyzes available. I have one last question for Krzys. I'm going to take advantage of the situation here and put you on the spot a bit I want to ask for some feature requests for Forma, mainly because it might be hard for you to say no when you're on video here in front of everyone. But don't worry. I'm not going to ask you to translate it into Japanese or something.

You can see from my demo that-- how useful the AI rapid wind analysis is when we couple it with Grasshopper for iterating designs quickly, mapping out the design space. I wanted to ask that rapid analysis be brought to all the analysis types and that they all work with imported Rhino meshes. I'm especially interested in getting access to the operational energy analysis that I'm showing here and, if it's introduced, the embodied energy analysis. So I want to ask, is this something you're working on? Or is this something we can expect?

KRZYSZTOF JEDRZEJEWSKI: The tricky part about this is where-- when you ask a product person whether something is coming, they will always say, I don't know. We cannot promise anything. But in this case, I think there are two parts to answer this question. First of all, our native teams of Forma are working and continuously developing the analysis.

And the goal is for all of them to support mesh geometry, since this is our native format for Forma. So I believe that this feature is coming. And what is more is, also, the carbon analysis, this is something that we are actively working on and developing. And we are hoping to have good progress by the AU time. So this first part to answer your question.