Evolving Carbon Analysis in Revit: Workflows for the Energy Analytical Model and Beyond

SIMON WHELAN: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our class on Evolving Carbon Analysis in Revit, Workflows for the Energy Analytical Modeling. Simon Whelan is my name. I'm joined by Tetsuya Hishida from the Autodesk Revit team. We'll introduce ourselves properly now in a minute as we get into the class.

Just to acknowledge, there is a few future looking product design prototypes in this class. So just to acknowledge the safe harbor.

Also, just to mention, this class is part of an unofficial track. We're calling it the sustainability track. There's a bunch of really great classes at this year's AU in 2024 that you may be interested in and very much aligned with what we're talking about here today, lots of stuff around carbon analysis, energy modeling, energy analysis, et cetera, across the Revit Autodesk Design Workflow. So please do check them out.

So just to get into the class a little bit more and what we'll be covering today, we're going to hear about how the process, the features, the functionality around generating an Energy Analytical Model is evolving over the last year or so. We're going to learn about how that EAM, or the Energy Analytical Model, can connect and create hybrid workflows across different Autodesk products, like I said, Forma, Revit Insight, for example.

And we're going to discover step-by-step workflows to create, view, and check the Energy Analytical Model in a new and intuitive way along the journey of your design process. And we're going to look and try and understand a little bit more how that Revit EAM can be used by different disciplines, for example, architectural, mechanical engineers, or designers for increased collaboration from early stage right through to the more detailed and later stages of a design project.

So, yeah, like I said, Simon Whelan is my name, based in Dublin, Ireland. I'm an architect originally, specialized in environmental design. And over the last 10 years or so, I've been involved with FenestraPro. I'm one of the founders there.

We develop facade design applications for designers, as I said, architects, engineers, et cetera. A big tie-in in integration with particularly Revit, but also Autodesk Forma and, tangentially, I suppose, Insight through our work with the Energy Analytical Model. So we've been an Autodesk industry partner for a number of years, a development network partner, a sustainability technology partner, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm also joined by Tetsuya, here, part of the Autodesk team. Tetsuya, thanks for joining.

TETSUYA HISHIDA: Yeah, thank you, Simon. So I would also like to introduce myself. I'm Tetsuya Hishida, Product Owner for Revit MEP Design.

These are the list of customer-facing features I've worked on since joining the Product team. And I have a background as a mechanical engineer and I am also a registered architect in Japan. But today, I want to show more about the engineering side on behalf of the engineers.

OK, so first, we'd like to define the problem we're trying to solve. And this is a typical communication between architects and mechanical engineers. So the architect would be planning, especially in the earlier phase, and starts laying out the rooms. And they're asking how large the planned rooms should be.

First of all, this is a very complicated question. There might be boilers, the system might be centrifugal chillers or absorption chillers, maybe some other pumps and stuff. But basically, the workflow starts from a heating and cooling load. The model might not be good enough for engineering, so in some cases, mechanical engineer would rebuild the model. But that really depends on each of the firms.

So the problem is that the exterior load depends a lot on what architects choose. So it has each other's dependency. And the heating and cooling load really is about the exterior load.

There is a lot of contribution for interior load for some building types. But architects haven't figured it out, especially in the early phase. They actually want to chime in how that would affect, so both of them knows that this is going to change quite often. So this work is going to be done in lots of iterations.

So suppose both know that Revit can do some sort of simulation and start to test this feature. Actually, the energy analytical model creation and also EnergyPlus execution is a bit difficult. So Revit Model basically is built for, for example, plan view or maybe realistic 3D view or schedules.

But this energy model creation is totally a different animal. You need a different skill set. And it might be sometimes too complicated. And for the mechanical engineer, if they're not savvy to Revit, they wouldn't know how to put their engineering knowledge into Revit. It's in there, but it's a bit complicated. And some mechanical engineers are not so familiar with Revit.

So the unfortunate current situation is, in these cases, architects know that there's lots of great things that we can do in Revit or Autodesk solutions, but they walk away and do their own job. And the mechanical engineer would start to get tired of making heating and cooling modal every time. So they just stick to the numbers, rule of thumbs, and maybe use PDF or use spreadsheet and say bye bye, Revit. So I'd like to hand it to Simon again.

SIMON WHELAN: Yeah, thanks, Tetsuya. I think that's a really good way of characterizing the problem from a collaborative point of view at the early stages of a project. The solution to that problem is the Energy Analytical Model. But then, that creates problems in and of itself and challenges around that EAM generation.

Users often get lost, we've seen. Quite complex settings and quite unclear parameters in terms of inputting those settings, and users aren't clear on what they're doing. It's maybe a little bit incoherent.

And there's a lack of clarity around the Energy Settings dialog in Revit. And we often see users don't understand how model elements are used, the geometry and the properties to those elements, the envelope elements, for example, which leads very often to an incomplete Energy Analytical Model or certainly an inaccurate one. We often see this kind of Revit fail to create a valid Energy Analysis Model.

And another big problem is we don't know why that happens. So we can click the "Learn to find more," but there is limited information around why that energy simulation fails. So if I'm a user and Revit has failed to generate my EAM, I have no really good guidance in how to fix it, how to resolve these problems to modify the model. So yeah, it's a common issue that we at FenestraPro have seen, and certainly the guys at Autodesk have seen quite a lot. So we have a pretty good solution, we think, which we'll get onto in a few minutes.

Just to talk about what the Revit Energy Analytical Model is for a second, just to put it in context, the EAM is, I suppose it's a simplified representation of the building. So it takes the form and the layout created as part of your architectural model, and it looks to create information relevant to analyze that building's energy use. So it's going to capture key parts of heat transfer throughout the building. So it's going to break up things into analytical spaces and analytical surfaces.

We'll talk a little bit about them now in a second. But the EAM effectively is used then for energy optimization in Revit, using Insight, for example, or using Systems Analysis for Revit, and even third-party tools, like ourselves with FenestraPro, and other tools. So it's a super important part of that energy analysis and simulation journey.

The analytical spaces, I suppose, that are created as part of that model are discrete volumes of air that experience heat loss or heat gain. So this could be through processes like occupancy or equipment or lighting, et cetera, as well as, obviously, heating and cooling within the space or heat exchange from other adjacent spaces or, obviously, the external environment.

So the analytical surfaces then are obviously the surfaces to those spaces, so the ceilings or roofs to them, the floors and the walls, the vertical elements to them, and how is heat transferring through those envelope elements. And in the EAM, we can apply properties, construction information to all of those different surfaces and components. And obviously, we have the geometry in a perfect world.

Why is it so important? I touched on it there a second ago. If we take the carbon analysis journey-- and you may have seen this slide in other classes-- along this sustainability track, we know that Revit is a huge part of this EAM creation piece. We're going to talk about that a lot today.

But the EAM is also being used by things like Insight, certainly by Revit Systems Analysis within the Revit environment, and as I said, third-party tools like FenestraPro. And so, needless to say, a robust and well-created model-- well-created Energy Analytical Model is crucial in these kind of energy simulation carbon analysis workflows.

Just to touch on a class I did last year with one of Tetsuya's colleagues on the Revit team, Eric Grey, which is quite aligned with what we're talking about today, we did a class last year on using the Revit Energy Analytical Model for Carbon Analysis from Concept to Detailed Design. And in that class, we touched on a lot. We talked about how these items EAMs are generated, whether it uses different modes, like the Rooms or Spaces mode or the Conceptual Masses and Building Elements mode, what all these common barriers are.

So what I talked about a few minutes ago, when an EAM fails to generate, well, why, or what are the key things that tend to go wrong, whether that be gaps in an enclosure or properties that aren't there or inconsistent models. And really what we started talking about was the different modes and how and when to use them, the pros and cons, and this idea that the Conceptual Masses and Building Elements mode might be quicker and let's call it less accurate, but quicker to access. Whereas the Rooms or Spaces mode might be a lot more detailed and watertight model, but it needs a lot more work to put into it.

But certainly, you're going to get quite a lot of accuracy from it. And we talked about how and when these modes should be used and getting away from the idea that, well, one is early stage and one is late stage. And then we also started talking about the different settings within those modes, certainly like the messy Energy Settings dialog of where things live and some of these key priority settings that you needed to select and set as part of these different modes.

And then we moved on and started within the bounds of the existing EAM generation. We started talking about different workflows. We talked through six different workflows from a really simple conceptual massing workflow right through to a super detailed model, taking all the properties within the detailed elements and how do you approach that.

And we really went through each workflow one by one and gave some really good tips on how to do something really fast and loose, but with great insights versus something slower but with lots of detail and much more accuracy. So really good class. Please do go and check it out if you get a few minutes.

So in the last year, I suppose, off the back of that class and off the back of all of these problems that Tetsuya and I have just been talking about here, we at FenestraPro have been working very closely with Autodesk to develop new workflows, to develop new, more intuitive ways to start looking at these problems and challenges and pain points, as it were. And we've prototyped what we're calling the Revit Energy Analytical Model quick. start Guide. So I'd like to take you through the workflow around this. And certainly, we can share the link for people to use themselves. You should be able to find it in the resources that are part of this class in the AU library.

But over the last number of months we've gone through this process with Autodesk where we've documented some of these key issues and settings and the associated user experience around them, including pain points, what are the things that are really tripping people up, what are the things that are causing inconsistent models or failed-to-generate models, et cetera. And we've tried to start conceptualizing some workflows, very outcome driven, like, what are you trying to achieve here, what are different users trying to achieve, what's their entry point, and where they're trying to get to. And over the last while, we've developed some pretty cool prototypes to address these user experiences.

At the moment, we're assessing those prototypes with various stakeholders, in other words, users, designers, architects, engineers, et cetera. And we're evaluating those approaches. So that's part of this class is that evaluation stage. And as I said, we'll share the link to this workflow. And please do give us your feedback because that will build the approach for the next step around how this development of an EAM application goes.

So let me jump in a little bit deeper and spend a few minutes walking through the application just at a very high level to introduce it. And it's going to be an add in, I suppose, native to Revit, that will be docked much like your Project browser or your Properties window within Revit. And it will step you through the process of creating and validating an EAM.

So I mean, I suppose there's three parts to this. Obviously, there's the Revit data, the geometry, the material properties, et cetera. But we're going to link that with Help dialogue and Support, as I said, which is quite lacking in terms of the step-by-step approach, specific guidance around where I am in the process and what I should do to get me to the next step. And within those steps then, we'll create automations.

So in other words, my selection of a setting will automate further steps around that. For example, the creation of views or other settings that may be appropriate. So we're not going to deep dive through every energy setting. Things will be set as you go as part of the process.

OK, so let me take you through this Guided Workflow, if I could. Just to note that, obviously, this is a prototype, and as such, not a live Revit environment. But it does represent all the steps of this kind of workflow to show the intuitiveness and to show the guidance, and really just to, as I said, get feedback. That's the key to all of this at the moment.

So we haven't changed anything in terms of how you're creating your EAM process works in terms of the starting point. Your energy optimization will still live in your Analyze ribbon. The button to create an EAM will still be the same. But I suppose it will give you some guidance around what we're doing. And it will give you two options. Certainly, the first option might be to guide you into this workflow, into this Quick Start guide. That might be if you're doing this on a model for the first time, or you're a designer who doesn't really know the ins and outs of what we're doing and you know model isn't really fully up to scratch and there's lots going to be wrong with it, and you really want to start resolving those issues as you go.

The second option is just cut straight to Create the EAM, really represents the button as it stands today in Revit. So I can just go ahead and jump right through all the steps and start trying to create from where I am. But certainly, we want to guide people into this workflow.

So within that workflow, then itself, as part of the discovery and design process of what we're doing here, we've categorized this into three key stages, I suppose. One is setting up the project, so it's where is this EAM going to live, some of the key overarching and overriding settings that are project-based, the model itself, et cetera.

Secondly, we're going to be adding some information to create the EAM itself, maybe some geometry or some material properties, for example. And then thirdly, we're going to create the EAM and validate it, QA/QC it, for example. We're going to be able to see and interact with it a little bit better and see what I have created and does it look right, and maybe fix things as we go.

So you'll see these represented in three, maybe, tabs like this. As I said, this process will create a docked window, which are Set up, your Create, and your Validate steps within this journey across here. First of all, we're in the Setup stage, where do you want to create this EAM? Will it be in this Revit project environment, will it be in this model itself, or will we create a new Revit project environment?

So what are the pros and cons around that. Again, maybe touching back on the AU class from last year, we talked a lot about that. Maybe you want to do it in this model, that's fine. It could be a pretty lightweight model. It could be very robust.

You may want to keep EAM within the model itself for whatever reason, but also, you may not. Maybe it's not a great model. Maybe you will want to make some changes, delete things from it, add things to it. Maybe you want to bring it in to a linked model and create a conceptual mass shrink wrapped around the detailed elements.

There's lots and lots of different reasons as part of this workflow where we can pull out the information and create an EAM on the side just to start making some quick changes and modifications. So let's just go with that workflow for the moment. I'll create that. I want to select my-- sorry, I will select Create EAM in a New Revit project. environment.

It will ask me to select a template. So we may have a couple of EAM templates created within our local environment here. It's going to close this Revit project, open a template, and bring that model into it. And it will bring that model in as a linked model either using elements within the linked model, in other words, I want to use some of that detail within that linked model, in which case that model will be room bounding.

Or I may want to use it as a base model to, as I said, create an EAM and shrinkwrap around it, or just add some simple detail or whatever that might be. In other words, it's a base. And we're not room bound in that model I'll select Use the Elements within that linked model. And it will create this 3D view.

So this is the view that the EAM is going to create from-- I can't remember which Revit version, 22 or 23 maybe. There's a really great change was made that it's only going to create the EAM on the view that you can see, on the elements within the view. So it's not going to take everything in the model visibility on or off. It's only going to take what I can see. And we can really leverage this fact to start priming our model really for this EAM.

So as I said, one of the key things to decide is do we use the Conceptual Masses and Building Elements mode or the Rooms or Spaces guidance around that, maybe some GIFs maybe some links out to support sites to really talk about the pros and cons around that. We want to configure this 3D view. This is going to tell us what we're doing step by step.

It's going to ask us which phase we're using. Is it the existing or the new construction or whatever phases you have set up in this model? In the case of conceptual massing, we may want to use the perimeter zone. It may be 20 feet or 6 meters or whatever that might be. And I can input that.

And certainly, I may want to define the ground plane. All of the levels to this model will exist within this. And I can select which one is used as the ground. In other words, anything below this ground floor, for example, will be below grade and will be treated as such.

Then, as I said, I want to just prime my model in terms of the geometry, what do I see. So we may want to add some massing. As I said, shrinkwrap the building or add some simple mass floors or whatever that might be.

This is guidance. And this is telling me what I need to do. I may want to add some detailed elements. There may be no roof to this model. Or there may be no floors, for example. So, I really need to start putting those things in to start creating a good scenario where I have good analytical spaces, for example.

And I may want to hide elements. As I said, we're only going to create the EAM on what we can see. So I can select things to hide them, turn them off, delete them, whatever I want to do to get them out of this generation process.

And certainly, in the case of a conceptual mass, I may want to define my percentage glazing as an overall window to wall ratio, or use something like FenestraPro, for example, to apply more detailed window to wall ratios around a conceptual mass and distribute it across different orientations and look at shading, et cetera.

OK, so that's my geometry. Constructions then, super important. Obviously, the material properties of all of these elements will be really, really key. But in Revit, at the moment, and in the Energy Settings dialogue, it's kind of confusing. It's overwhelming how we manage these different types.

We have conceptual types, we have schematic types, and we have detailed elements. The story is, conceptual types are your default. It will use these properties of these types of constructions for your walls, your roofs, your floors, et cetera, unless you override it.

So I can select, I don't know, high mass construction or a lightweight construction or whatever that might be. That's what's going to be used on all my different envelope components unless I override it with a schematic type. So I can select an exterior wall and a roof or whatever that might be and override those elements with a lightweight, typical blah, blah, blah. And we will give more detail around the construction types.

So now what's going to happen is these conceptual types will be used for everything except for exterior walls and roofs, in which case, it's going to use these schematic types, unless I override that with the properties that are applied through the detail element. So that is material properties applied to the family. For example, a U-value to your wall system or a solar heat gain coefficient to your windows and glazing, et cetera.

And we can tick that on [AUDIO OUT] off accordingly. So we're trying to just make that a little bit more coherent. I think there's more we can do. I think we can take that to a next stage. I think we can link a better [AUDIO OUT] type. So I think we can do lots and lots to make it even better. But here's where we are at the moment.

Then we're into Building and Spaces. We talked about different building types. Certainly, we can just set a default. Is this a museum or is it an office or is it a school or whatever it might be, this has been set to the building as a default. It will use Office for all of the spaces within this building unless I override that by adding spaces.

So I can add rooms, which don't contain that kind of metadata, or I can add spaces which does. So I can apply a space that has it's a circulation space or a plant room. And it contain the necessary properties and zoning information that Tetsuya and his good side of the house will really utilize in a much more mechanical engineering manner. But this is how we can get a little bit better in terms of the break up of all these analytical spaces.

And then, the HVAC systems, high level, but we do have a dropdown of different types. But me, as an architect, and certainly at an early stage, I may whatnot, not know the ins and outs or the pros and cons of these different systems. So we've tried to allow this slider where we can apply a moderate efficiency versus a high efficiency selection. And that will drive the selection of your system.

So at least I don't need to get into the weeds. I know that I'm going to have a high efficiency system. And that's all the decision I made want to make at this stage. Or we could get into the weeds and some of the workflows that Tetsuya is going to talk about a little later.

At that point, then, I want to create my EAM. I've got all the geometry in. I've got, I think, all of the material properties in there. And when I get on to this Validate stage, it's going to automatically create two views, my Analytical Spaces view and my Analytical Surfaces view.

Nothing is really shown on them yet because I haven't created it. But when I do create that, it's going to give you your usual dialogue around, this may take a couple of minutes, please, complete the steps, and whatever that might be. It's going to generate your EAM.

I've seen them being generated in 10, 15 seconds. And I've seen them take 10 or 20 minutes, depending on the level of information. Using this workflow and hiding elements and getting it out of the model should improve that, should streamline that process. But then, when that EAM is generated, we'll start seeing those analytical spaces and surfaces on our views.

But we also have the ability to break into those views and start manipulating them. So in my Analytical Spaces, for example, I can start looking at the different space types, as I said, the office spaces or the circulation. Or I might want to filter it down by the level that I'm looking at. Or I may want to get into the Analytical Surfaces views and start looking at different elements, for example, exterior walls or floors or whatever.

And again, we may want to start looking at levels. For example, in this view here, then, we might just isolate this Exterior Wall view. And we'll see it's a heavily glazed building, but there is lots of different parts in the spandrels, and certainly around this entrance area, there's external walls. But we can see there's an incomplete thing going on here, and we're not entirely sure.

But we also want to maybe go back and look at our Analytical Spaces, and when we do, maybe drill into, say, for example, the Ground Floor view. I can see this Analytical Space is incomplete. Maybe there's a Base level and there's an Upper Ceiling level to it. But I don't see any of the vertical walls to that space. So there's enough reason maybe to start trying to fix this model or modify it.

We can certainly modify it by looking at the Analytical Resolution. So we talked last year, again, in the class about how the Energy Analytical Model is created using the voxel method and looking at the spaces, building up 3D blocks within it, effectively. And the size of those 3D pixels or voxels establishes gaps or coherent spaces or not. And I can drive the resolution of that accordingly. And that will affect how my Analytical Spaces are created.

So in this scenario, I'm going to reduce the Analytical resolution. I'll create my EAM again. I'll go through this process. It'll take a minute or 30 seconds or whatever that might be.

And now, when it recreates, I can see that when I isolate this Ground Floor view, it has a much more coherent Analytical Space within that ground floor. Or I may just go back and look at the Elements view, isolate my external walls, zoom in on my lobby area. And you can see it's much, much better in terms of the external surfaces, the Analytical Surfaces around there. I still see a gap. So maybe I want to drill into this 3D view, query that, see what's going on, fix it, go through the process again, change my resolution, et cetera, et cetera.

So what we're trying to do is give a better understanding of what's going in and what's coming out for users, to allow them to understand how their EAM is created and is it working or not, and certainly give guidance and support on all those different points in the process. So Tetsuya, anything to add to that I've missed?

TETSUYA HISHIDA: No, you did great. Thank you so much. One thing to note is that this tool is developed as a collaboration. And it's not something like a very expensive third-party tool that you have to purchase.

Of course, FenestraPro itself is a great tool. But what you've just seen is this Quick Start Guide that we're working on to pull into Revit so that all the Revit users can use. That's one note that I wanted to take.

OK, so I'll go ahead and talk about what our team is working on. So as a team, we are taking care of MEP design. And what we're now focusing is how to provide a clearer and logical, efficient HVAC zoning workflow for users. And this is something very large that it's much better to collaborate with these talented partners. And we're making this collaborative development.

So as the first step, we are trying to make this HVAC zoning workflow in-house, but the energy model itself, it needs that kind of intelligence. And for example, this is not only for architects, but mechanical engineer might be playing a big role in it. So Simon mentioned the space types. And space types are the stuff I'm showing on the left-hand side.

So this mechanical engineer is saying, oh, here's my occupancy load. So this thing that you predefined is going to be applied to all those space types. So maybe, once you figure out how much area per person you want in this particular space type, architects might be able to choose those. But I think mechanical engineer are more responsible to defining the value in each of the space types. So it'll be a good way to collaborate.

And when the engineers would want to dig in deeper-- so there is another class we're doing on this AU-- it's more of the detailed side of the mechanical engineer workflow. So this is things-- multiple things, one thing is it gives you the ASHRAE baseline system auto-sized, so it will be a good start. And you can also override some key characteristics, such as COP. And please give it a look.

And some of those might say EnergyPlus is not for me. So we are working closely with NREL, who's developing EnergyPlus. And EnergyPlus seems to be something more about NREL annual simulation. That's the perception. But we see lots of users using it for heating and cooling load. And they're making lots of fix.

And also, one thing for good news for the Unicode-using countries, so there was a mysterious bug in EnergyPlus that if you include these character, EnergyPlus would just break. Autodesk pinpointed it and contributed to the open source EnergyPlus project. And now it's solved. So now it's a much better state that you can trust EnergyPlus.

So finally, architects is more confident in taking care of the EAM creation. And they can make early decision. And also, I think now the game is changing. And it's that embodied carbon is also a big thing.

Embodied carbon also uses this EAM, Energy Analytical Model. So now, if you make this model, you can benefit in lots of means. And as mentioned, mechanical engineer can jump in on that model and take care of the factors that affect the operational carbon.

So I think we're now getting to find the better way to collaborate. And still work to be done. But we're in the good track. And I'd like to hand it back to Simon to wrap up.

SIMON WHELAN: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, just to finish off and just to outline a bit of a summary and some benefits. Well, I suppose one of the key things that we've tried to achieve here in the workflows that we've prototyped and conceptualized is really about understanding and trust and confidence.

And I said it there when we were finishing the workflows, it's about understanding what goes in and what comes out and having a little bit of a hand in that. And so we're really trying to increase that, particularly for architectural users at the early stage. But then, in a more detailed manner, and Tetsuya, you spoke about it there, allowing more granular information from an engineering point of view and allowing to drill into spaces and add some information and detail and draw some detail from that and some data from that. This helps that from a mechanical design point of view.

So really, as you said, it's all about increasing collaboration between those disciplines. We want to be working from the same information. We want early access to that information within the lifetime of the design project. And we want to be making data-driven decisions really from that Building Information Model, and subsequently, that Energy Analytical Model.

So all of this work, as I'd call it, really, at this stage, has gone into getting some feedback from some early stakeholders and users. Some of the information and some of the feedback we've got has been great. And it's been across the board. So like Tetsuya mentioned a second ago, it's all about collaboration.

And we've got really great feedback from whether it be architects at an early stage or building performance analysts or mechanical engineers. Everybody is saying that this is the missing piece in Revit. And this is going to increase adoption of Revit as an energy analysis tool by way of opening up access to the EAM and the information that goes into the EAM.

So I guess the last thing I need to do is thank Tetsuya for speaking today. Thanks, Tetsuya.

TETSUYA HISHIDA: Thank you, Simon.

SIMON WHELAN: And thank you to everyone who's watched the class. I would encourage you, as well, as I said, the workflow link should be within the resources that will be part of this class. So please do have a look and give us your feedback online. We'd be really interested to have it. Thank you very much.