From Forma to Revit and Back Again: A CUBE3 Story

TONY FIORILLO: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us at AU 2023. My name is Tony Fiorillo. And this presentation is From Forma to Revit and Back Again, A CUBE3 story. So why don't we just dive right in?

Who are we? It's a great question. We collectively, as your presenters today, we work for a company called CUBE3. We are headquartered in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with regional offices in Boston, Princeton, New Jersey, and Miami, Florida. We were established in 2003. And if you'd like to learn more about our company, please take a look at our website, which is www.cube3.com.

So moving on from there, I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself. Again, Tony Fiorello, I'm the CIO here at CUBE3. I've worked in the AEC industry for roughly 30 years, providing IT and digital practice services to the community. I've been at CUBE3 for about four years now. Tino, if you want to take it away?

TINO FREITAS: Yes. Hello, my name is Tino Freitas. I'm the BIM Manager here at CUBE3 for the past couple of years. I am a licensed architect originally from Portugal.

And I have a passion for design and for software and anything that is innovative. And I'm very happy to be here today. I'll pass it on to Aline.

ALINE ANTUNES: Hi, guys. My name is Aline Antunes. I'm a Project Manager here at CUBE3. I'm located in the Miami office. I do have a heavy background in hospitality and high-end residential, which is where my expertise jump into our programming today with our boutique hotel. I'm super excited to be here with you guys today.

TONY FIORILLO: All right, great. And for those who are interested, our full bios are in the handout. So please feel free to check that out, and also, available at the AU website.

So again, what is Forma, for those folks who don't know. I don't think there are going to be a lot attending this class who won't know what Forma is, but just a quick overview. Forma is a cloud-based AI-driven design tool that's made to help empower architects, urban planners, and real estate developers, and to help them create meaningful, high-quality site proposals in a rapid way.

So what we have here on the slide, we can quickly create 3D massings so that we can see how our ideas are going to affect the-- or impact the sites around us. We can also do a lot of testing with new Forma that we couldn't do before in one package, especially environmental testing. And then it's all streamlined, which is something that we're going to be talking about today, how the relationship between Forma and Revit and the underlying Autodesk platform services connect the two so that we can produce faster, more cutting edge, early site development plans than ever before, to be totally honest.

All right, why are we here? I think I just gave that away. But specifically, what we're going to be talking about today is the connection between Forma and Revit through the Revit add-on connector.

What this is going to allow us to do is create proposals in Forma, then take that proposal into Revit, manipulate the data in Revit, and then bring it back to Forma for analysis. So let's jump right into that.

The agenda for today's instructional class. We are 60 minutes of instruction, 30 minutes of discussion and Q&A. Section One is going to be how to create a proposal informal. Section Two is going to be how to integrate the context into Revit. And then Section Three, finally, we will run an environmental analysis on the model that we've just imported from Revit into Forma. All right, so that being said, I am now going to hand it off to Tino to lead us through this.

TINO FREITAS: Hello. I am Tino Freitas, the BIM Manager. Thank you for attending. Thank you, Tony.

So starting a new proposal in Forma is quite easy. First thing you need to do is, with your Autodesk credentials, you need to log into the app.autodeskforma.com address that's all in our handout. And once you do that, you will see something similar to this.

As you see, we've been using Forma quite a lot. It's one of our favorite platforms to start projects in. And we will start our project today this way.

So the first thing you need to do, after you logged in, is to go here to the New Project tab. Once you do that, you will need to type the address of the place that you want your project to be in. So in this case, we are going with a Miami address, 600 Northwest 5th Street. And you don't need to be very rigorous when you're inserting the address because the database is quite extensive and finds your address very easily.

So once your address is located, you will need to confirm the map area. And here, it's very important that you pay attention to the area that you choose because the larger the area you choose, the more data you're going to be bringing into Revit. So you want to limit this to be around 0.20 square miles is usually what we like, what we find is a good balance.

So as you zoom in, you will see here on the side that the square area is reducing. So let's go ahead and pick when it's around 0.20. So if you confirm this map area, just simply do that, and now Forma is bringing all that information into our proposal.

All right, so once you're in this window, these are the options that you have as far as loading buildings, roads, and property boundaries. The terrain gets automatically added. And this type of terrain is the one that is added, so it's with 1 meter resolution USGS.

So now we will need to select the buildings for that area. There are two options for buildings one of them is flat. It's really probably the one that we use the least. And the one that is more realistic and automatically more correct would be the open city model.

So when you click on that, it will, again, zoom into the same area that you had previously chosen. And now you can just do Order, and that will grab all the geometry of the buildings in that area. You should repeat the same process for the roads. Wait a little bit. And let's do order.

And also, for property boundaries, you should be a little bit more careful because, technically, the property boundaries can-- you don't need property boundaries of this whole area. So I would limit, probably, the property boundaries to a smaller area here. So you can just do that by grabbing these points here.

And I'm not sure why I can't pick this one. There you go. So around this area would be enough. And you can just do order.

And now that you have all the layers you need to assemble your proposal, you can close out of this. Pay attention to the prompts that show up here on top of the screen. So you can close out of this menu and go to your library. This is where you will see the stuff that you just ordered. So placing it on the canvas, right now, you're seeing the terrain.

So let's start with the buildings. Just select the layer and Forma will prompt you with this. You can just do Add. Same for the roads, do add-- sorry, terrain. That's been updated.

And the property boundaries were last. Let's add that. So once your property boundaries and all the layers have been added, you can zoom in to your area. And if there are any buildings that need to be demolished or removed from the proposal, you can simply edit them out. And it's as easy as selecting the building.

And once that happens, you will notice that the Edit the Base to Make Changes becomes active. So if you click there, you are able to just select it and delete.

Once your site is cleared, you are free to create your site property. And that is achieved with this tool here. It's the site limit. There's a shortcut for it. So all these little characters next to the commands are the keyboard shortcuts that you can use. So, site limits.

And now you can draw your site. It will snap to all the intersections. In this case, our site is pretty simple. And don't forget to press Enter, because if you press Escape, as it is in most Autodesk applications, Escape will also work as Enter, but in Forma, it does not.

So once you have this completed, you are basically ready to send this to Revit. But Revit has to be ready, so we need to go to our Revit screen now, which should look something like this. And you will start a new Revit model.

So we have two options here. If you want to just have a very small file with just this information, maybe for a site model, you can pick New. And rather than picking one of your company templates, you can just do None, and select Metric or Imperial, depending on your area. And you will have definitely a very small file that just contains the Forma geometry.

In our case, we will use one of our company templates and use that as a base. So once that opens-- give that a second. Please ignore this screen. You should look at something like this.

And we recommend going to a 3D view where you'll be able to see the Forma content as it's placed into this canvas. So back to Forma here. And there is a button that you should select in order to send your proposal to Forma. So go back to the Navigator, Proposal, click on the Ellipses, and do Revit, send to Revit.

If you have not downloaded the add-in, you can do it here as well. But preferably, you have that all set. So send to Revit, and that will create a link to your Revit file. So as you go here to your Revit file, navigate to the Massing and Site tab. And that is where you will find the format add-in.

Note that if your format add-in is not updated, you will get an extra icon here telling you to update. So please make sure that your Revit add-ins are updated. And you can click Load Proposal. This will load the proposal from Forma. Only takes a couple of seconds.

It's going to give you the proposal name. In this case, we did not title it. But technically, you should be able to title this a little bit more accurate. So let's do Load. And this is a four step process, the load.

So once this process is completed, we will have our geometry in Revit, and we'll be able to start modeling. In our case, since we already have a building that's modeled, or fairly modeled, fairly developed, we will just link that model into Revit and bind it. And because the binding process is a little time consuming, we have an option-- we have already a model that has the binding process completed.

So you might get this notification. And I was informed by Autodesk that this is pretty normal. And it has to do with the road data and Revit not yet being ready to accept all the road data. So if you get this, just to close.

And as you see, you will have your 3D Forma background that is georeferenced. So if you want to see with a little bit more detail, you can go here to the New Textures, Graphic Display option. And you can see that this is our site. You have the satellite data as a material, which allows us to see the model this way.

In this situation, the next thing we need to do is either we would model-- we could model a mass in place and send that back to Revit for analysis. We, as I said, have already a model that we can use, so we're just going to link it. We would just link it and bind it.

I have that already completed in one of my other projects just so that we don't spend time doing it. And once you place your model and bind, it should look something like this. So everything is accessible here. Do not leave your model as a link because Forma will not read the links.

Once you have that completed, you are ready to send this proposal back to Forma for the very first analysis. And this is where I'm going to hand it to Aline. But before that, let me just show you how to load the proposal into Forma.

So when you are here-- so you should be able to-- the update to Forma is going to be available. So if you make any modifications on your file, the update to Forma should be available. And so you go Massing Insight, and Update Proposal.

Then you can pick the view that you want to update, and click on Update. And this will send the information back to Forma. This is a three step process. And then once it's done, you should get something like this, successfully updated model in Forma. So, Aline.

ALINE ANTUNES: Thank you, Tino. And so what we're going to get started with is starting out with that Forma section again. So as you can see, this is the hub. And Tino has gone ahead and added me to that proposal. Note that you can only view the proposals that you've been added to, as he had mentioned previously. So if you're looking for something to be editable by other teammates, please make sure that you're sharing it with them.

So I'm going to go ahead and click into my latest proposal. And here you can see the model that Tino had placed in from our Revit model and loaded back into Forma with all of the information that we received from Forma. And I think that one of the best tools that I don't think is emphasized enough is that if you start a proposal in Forma, it automatically geolocates you in Revit, which I think is a phenomenal aspect of this.

So as you can see here, we have also duplicated our proposal. And our previous proposal that has no intervention in it, you can see here as well. And to duplicate it, you click on the ellipses, and hit duplicate. But we've already gone ahead and done that and renamed them for the portions of our class today.

From this point, we'll be running through the analysis that Forma offers to us in order to explain how our design has evolved from where it began to where we will end up towards the end of our class. So the first thing to note is that we're looking at a boutique hotel located in Miami. Here you have a simple building of a podium garage with a simple tower above it that has a lot of different programs.

So you have your hotel rooms. You'll also have an amenity deck and things of that nature that would support a hotel down here in Miami. So a big item to talk about here is that our pool deck is this one that I'm highlighting here. And that is where majority of our analysis will be run on.

So as I zoom out, you'll see a little bit more. But Forma does allow you to investigate a lot for your intervention throughout this with a different number of analysis. One of the big ones that I just want to touch upon is your area metrics. I think that these are incredibly important, especially if you're tracking performance and how your building is evolving as well.

And you're allowed to assign different functions to different floor plates. And that will carry out your gross square footage and also your FAR requirements as well, which is a phenomenal tool to have accessible. We'll be focusing mostly on sun hours. So I'll come back to this one in a second. But some other options that you have are daylight potential.

But if you click into, you'll see here wind analysis, microclimate, operational energy, noise. And there are other additional extensions as well that you can pull into Forma as you're developing your project. And there are a few, just to note, that you'll notice that there are fast analysis and then there are detailed analysis that you can run further that will take a little bit more time. And we'll get back to that one in a little bit.

So back to the core of what we're going through today is we wanted to review sun hours. So the main goal of ours is to address what our client was desiring for this pool deck, which is to allow for maximum daylighting in portions of it, while locating a pool on this deck here. So as you can see, a good portion of this is in shade. And we're going to run this for December 21, which is the winter solstice, which would be the point that you have the lowest sun in the sky, so the most detrimental condition for this whole deck as we start.

So I'm going to hit Run Analysis. Here, you can see that our analysis has been complete. There are a few options in selecting them. But since I clicked Run, it already populated open here. But to investigate a little bit further, you'll see that there is an Inspect tool up here.

So at first, you'll see that the bottom of your screen does change in color corresponding to the color that's showing up on your intervention. If I hit the Inspect tool, I'm able to place my cursor on top of the model and click to see what type of daylighting we would be looking at in sun exposure on these areas. So there are portions of this deck that have significantly large amounts of daylighting. But as I zoom in a little bit further, you see that if we placed our pool in this location, that is our original intent, we'd be having a limited availability of sun exposure. So that wouldn't be the ideal for our client.

Just to go through this process one more time, we're going to run also for one of the equinoxes, so March 21. So we're going to run it for the 20th. You'll see here that the Run Analysis button populates.

As you can see, before you run the analysis, you can verify what intervention you are running it on. So in this case, we've uploaded one building. But if you're looking through a master plan, all of those forms that you've uploaded into Forma would highlight as well. So you're ensuring that you're running the analysis on the portion of your intervention that you're looking for the results on.

So we're going to run this analysis. It does take a few minutes, between 30 seconds to two minutes, depending on the size of your project. And once that is complete, you'll notice that there are two options for you to view your analysis. One pop-up will show up in the center of your screen once it's completed, and it will prompt you to analyze your analysis. And also, there's other areas to open up your analysis as well. But I'll point those out once they're populated on our screen.

So as you can see here, you can click See Analysis Results, or you can also hit Open Analysis over here as well. So those are your options to view them.

You can see the similar condition that we saw in December as well. And a quick thing to note is if you have, let's say, a pool deck that has limited hours of operation, you can also choose to edit the duration of your analysis. So if I wanted to start at 6:00 AM and only go till 8:00 PM, that is an option as well.

But for the purpose of our class, we'll be tracking the entirety of the day. But you'll see that it automatically auto-adjusts to the time frame that you're selecting.

Here, we're going to click our Inspect tool again in order to see how this has been affected. So in March, we're looking at about 11.8 hours of sun in this portion of the deck. And if I were to zoom in here on the part that is covered, we're looking at about two hours, almost three, but not quite.

So when reviewing this with our client, we were presented with the opportunity to reshape this roof in order to really adjust how this pool deck is functional for the user. And what we're looking for is a nice in-between of still a good amount of sun, not limited to two or three hours because that's not viable here in Miami, but allowing for shade in certain portions of the pool as needed throughout the day as well.

So going back to our proposal now. And what we've done is we've reshaped our roof in Revit. And we've already loaded it into Forma in order for us to run our analysis again with a new intervention. And you'll see here I'm going to jump over to our proposal two.

And you'll see here that what we've done is we've pulled back the roof and located the pool on the Eastern side of this pool deck. And we're going to run those analysis again. So let's start again with our December.

And while that's going through, you'll also note that there is a View History button. So as you're going through these processes and running these analysis over and over again, you are able to review what your history looks like. I'm just going to click here so you can see.

You hit All Analysis, drop down. This one is still in progress as it's being run. But there are previous analysis that have been run on this as well. So you can track through your progress as well as you go through this.

Here we are. Our analysis is complete for our December month. And like I mentioned before, we're going to keep the time interval at 24 hours, because in Miami, we know we never sleep, so we might as well trial it for the entire day. Going to click my Inspect tool again at the top. And we'll see how this has been affected.

So as we knew, this was about 10 hours of sunlight. And now we're looking at, towards the building itself, towards the built form, towards the back, almost eight hours of sun, which is a good amount of sun versus shade as opposed to the 10 hours of direct sunlight. And then closer to the structure as well, as you see here, we have a little bit more of a limited amount of sunlight.

So here you give the optionality to the user and to the hotel guests. Those who want to stay in the sun have that option. And those who do not have an area of refuge as well throughout the day so that this pool deck can be used to its best ability.

We're going to go back. And now we're going to run this for March and also for June, which are our heavy months here. And these are simple things that we were able to achieve with our clients in the room so they can visually see the graphics and how simple changes to a form can be updated in Forma and analyses rerun so that we can achieve whatever the goals are of our client and really maximize the use of their building for what their desired outcome is.

So in March, as the heat really increases and the sun does as well, we're looking at about 11.5 hours of sun towards the front of our pool deck. Same with this side as well. And as you come into this area and it's closer to a built form, almost six hours. And towards the back of our pool as well, about 8.5 hours. So this really gives a versatile option for most hotel guests. So like we said, we want to allow for that type of flexibility so that people feel comfortable within the space as well.

And then last, but definitely not least, we're going to run a nice peak of summer in the June month. And as I mentioned, this does take between 30 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on the size of your intervention. Obviously, the more complex forms will take a little bit longer. So if we had just a massing here, it would be a quicker study versus here, we've already dived into a little bit more of those floor plates and articulating more of the architecture on the exterior of this building.

Our analysis is complete. So I'm going to click Open Analysis. You can see with the more direct sunlight, you do get more shade on your facade. But for your pool deck itself, if we go to our Inspect tool, we can see that the front of your pool deck is expected about 13 hours of sunlight, which is a good amount for Miami, for sure.

And like we mentioned before, we're always looking for that area that has a nice balance between some shade but also some sun as well to give that versatility of this pool deck. And here, we'll click one more location, a little under eight hours. So depending on how this goes, obviously, we'd be looking at supplementing some of these with maybe furniture or greenery. But here, we've been able to achieve what the main goals were for our client to allow for not only direct sunlight but indirect sunlight, and also, some areas of shade as well, as we've dialed into the articulation of the architecture of these roofs.

So as we mentioned before, a simple shifting or reshaping of a roof structure can really quickly address a lot of the concerns that clients have. And the availability to run these analysis with them has been invaluable. I'm going to pass it over to Tony.

TONY FIORILLO: All right, well, thank you. Aline, Tino, it was very informative. We really appreciate your hard work on this. And for me, just I want to give a quick recap and maybe some notes here.

So what did we see today? During the session, we saw how easy it was to create a proposal in Forma. We saw how easy it was to integrate context into Revit and bring a model that was pre-built into the context of the Forma platform and how to export it back.

And just for me, as a CIO and somebody who's really focused on how to help folks work more productively and save time, that's a huge time saver, the fact that you could do work in Revit and then update it in Forma so almost on the fly, if not on the fly, has a really big value. And also, I want to point out that the majority of what we did today was all live on the cloud. So while it seemed like there might have been some pauses in this presentation where things took a little bit of time to run the analysis, in the grand scheme of things, four minutes, five minutes is not that much time to run these analyses, right?

Typically, we would have to take this model, send it out to a third-party, ask them to do it at a cost of however many thousands of dollars and time, so that we were to be able to present it back to our client. Forma also creates visually impactful imagery so that we can share that with our client as well. We can also share online live with our client because it's cloud-based. So a lot of really great stuff going on with this product.

I encourage everybody who hasn't, to get in there up to your elbows and experiment with it. One thing we didn't cover is also, one of their environmental analyses is a carbon footprint analysis to help you try to figure out how to get your build into carbon zero, which is fantastic. And I'm sure a lot of you already know this, but this product is available as part of the AEC package. So there's no additional cost at the moment for you to be able to start working with this product.

So I suggest that you guys get logged on and start checking it out and start building stuff. And just get in there. Next slide.

So we want to do this slide first. As I believe I mentioned at the beginning, we were fortunate enough to be part of a Forma pilot program to help prepare this product for release in the US markets. And we just wanted to take a quick minute to say thank you to all the folks here at CUBE3 who helped make that pilot program a success for us. So these are the folks who took part in the pilot. Next slide.

And that's it. Thank you for your time. And we appreciate the opportunity to present our work to you.