After modeling their entire office, Brandon and Brian are now focusing their attention on Radiance material definitions to accurately run daylight simulations using Autodesk Ecotect

Brandon Pence and I have been busy defining the best practices to efficiently break down the Revit model and leverage its interoperability with Ecotect Analysis which is part of my upcoming presentation at Autodesk University – BIM for Advanced Daylighting. As presented in our previous Living Labs posts, DesignGroup’s Office as a Living Lab, and First Results from DesignGroup’s Living Lab Case Study, we are examining how close reality and our daylight simulation process actually are to one another so we can improve our design process creating more sustainable outcomes for our clients.

As Brandon has been working to more deeply understand the Ecotect and Radiance Material libraries, we have refined out initial readings to a more accurate level of detail. The most recent simulation run of our Vista Conference room yielded a 4% difference between reality and simulation (industry standard is 25%) which is an extremely exciting outcome. Next up are the dozens of other simulations we need to run on the other rooms. Stay tuned as we broadcast the results.