Insight Product Team
With the release of Autodesk Revit 2025 on April 2nd, we announced Total Carbon Analysis for architects and previewed new features in Autodesk Forma, Revit, and Insight that will help architects evaluate Embodied and Operational Carbon impacts of their designs. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of the next generation of Autodesk Insight, now available as an entitlement with Revit and AEC Collection subscriptions. This new analysis capability equips architects with the data and insights they need to make smarter, more informed decisions around operational and embodied carbon, and supports carbon mitigation in the built environment for a more sustainable and resilient future. You can access Insight through your Autodesk Account. Look for “Insight for Revit 2025 and note that this release is compatible with Revit 2023.1 and above. There’s more on the workflow in the Revit product help.
We’re also excited to announce the release of a curated list of on-demand tutorials at Autodesk Learn for setting up the Revit Energy Analytical Model for carbon analysis with Insight.
Already have Revit?
Download the Insight add-in from your Autodesk account and take hold of your design’s carbon footprint.
Heightened demand for low carbon building design
It’s no secret that carbon mitigation is an urgent priority in building design, with Reuters recently reporting that we have “reached a tipping point,” where market demand for low carbon building stock is at an all-time high. While architects have always been drivers of more sustainable ways to design and build, especially during a project’s early stages, carbon analysis presents challenges that have typically required a very specialized set of tools and subject matter expertise. Architecture firms of all sizes have said to us they are limited in the ability to easily and continuously track a design’s carbon footprint, as a project evolves from conceptual to detailed design. To mitigate the carbon impacts of their projects, they need:
- Real-time feedback and insights for the carbon impacts of design decisions, beginning at the conceptual stage of design
- Analytical tools that are open, transparent, and customizable to account for differing standards, factors, and means of accurate carbon accounting
- Integration with Revit workflows that make iteration, scenario-driven comparison, and collaboration simpler and more intuitive at every stage of design
The next generation of Insight is a cloud service that integrates with Revit to offer flexible dashboards, an intuitive interface, and a simple approach to analysis that makes it easy to explore, visualize, and compare carbon analysis results. Insight continues to use Revit’s Energy Analytical Model as the starting point for Operational (OC) and Embodied Carbon (EC) analysis. Open and extensible, Insight helps you measure, visualize, and compare the interrelated effects of integrated building systems, including: building form and orientation, envelope design, internal loads, HVAC systems, material types and quantities, renewable energy offsets, energy costs and more.
“Next Gen Insight represents a paradigm shift from a traditional model-centric approach, where models dictate and limit ‘insights’, to a data and dashboard approach which puts the user in control of their carbon insight journey. I believe it is the first step among many that will link building simulation professionals to sustainability analytics, an emerging practice critical for validating the measurements and analysis used in environmental disclosures.”
Moses Scott
Digital Technology & Data Analytics Specialist, SNHA
How the next generation of Insight makes carbon analysis more accessible for architects
Insight helps architects quantify and visualize operational and embodied carbon data stored in the Revit Energy Analytical model. Insight can aggregate and visualize data from Revit for building envelope performance, material specifications, and more to show the interplay between carbon impacts and energy offsets, among other factors.
Insight integrates with Revit through the Revit Energy Analytical Model, tying analysis capabilities to iterative architectural design.
The Revit Energy Analytical Model provides a consistent starting point from which both Embodied and Operational carbon analyses can be evaluated together. Embodied Carbon analysis in Insight makes use of data from Building Transparency’s EC3 database for material Embodied Carbon, and you can replace these defaults or add you own EC definitions. For Operational Carbon, Insight utilizes EnergyPlus, a globally employed open-source simulation engine for energy analyses, developed by the US Department of Energy (DOE), curated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and used throughout the world for dynamic energy simulations
A defining attribute of this next generation of Insight is that it is open. You are not limited by the data and analysis capabilities that come out-of-the-box. Customize and extend Insight to meet different needs and account for varying metrics and factors, visualized through interactive dashboards that help you explore and explain key design decisions that impact carbon footprint.
“The ability to adapt and present outputs created by Insight on the fly can help in reaching critical design decisions more promptly and help directly connect with client requirements.”
Gareth Sewell
Head of BIM, Purcell
What’s Next for Insight?
Finally, some may be wondering: if this is the next generation of Insight, what’s happening to the ‘original’ Insight, aka Insight-Green Building Studio? At this time, Insight-GBS will continue to work alongside next gen Insight. We will share more information about this and other product development progress in the future.
Join us next month for a webinar on the next generation Insight. In the meantime if you’d like more background on Insight and our priorities for development, check out these recent AU classes.
Join Autodesk and Stantec on May 21st for a webinar highlighting new carbon analysis capabilities in Forma, Revit, and Insight.
We can’t wait for you to get your hands on this release and our very excited to add Total Carbon Analysis for architects to support sustainable, low carbon design.
We’d love to hear your feedback, both on this release and our future direction, which you can find details of in our roadmap for Architecture under the category for Simulation and Analysis. Please leave your comments here or contact the product team directly at insight.support@autodesk.com. We’d love to hear from you!
– The Insight Product Team