05 Feb, 2020Two New Christmas Apps
Christmas school holidays can be tough if you work from home, but I was able to get a couple of little projects done that I have had rolling around in my head for quite a while. The first allows you to create low-poly 3D trees of various levels of abstraction, and the second lets you view simple polyhedra and apply sequential geometric operations to generate higher-order shapes and forms.
Tree Generator
This web app lets you interactively generate both abstract and realistic procedural 3D trees for use with BIM and building performance analysis. Once generated, you can analyse dynamic shading effects as well as exporting them as geometry or generating the code required to create the same tree in a BIM model or with a script. It also serves as a visual test suite for stress testing my tree geometry generation code under lots of different conditions and configurations.
Software Details
16 Apr, 2019Some New Solar Articles
Whilst writing some new documentation for my solar analysis API classes, I kept adding way too much background information, making them far too long to actually read. At that point I knew I had to separate that stuff out, so decided to add them as a series of articles on my website.
18 Dec, 2018Sky Distribution Equations
A number of people have asked me for more information about a comment I made in the CIE Sky app description about using the "latest" sky distribution equations. Basically, whilst trying to work out why the numbers I was getting from my implementation of the CIE Standard General Sky were slightly different to those from other popular daylight tools, I noticed that all of them appeared to be based on code that implemented the original Perez All-Weather Sky equations published in 1993, rather than the CIE Standard General Sky equations from 2003. The differences between the two are relatively small, but certainly enough to confound any direct numerical comparison.
09 Jun, 2018New Schedule Editor
I have finally finished my online annual hourly schedule editor, which took several iterations and quite some time to get working the way I wanted. It's of interest because hopefully its relatively easy to use and can read and write schedules in a range of different formats, including EnergyPlus (IDF and epJSON), OpenStudio (OSM), DIVA/DaySim (.OCC.CSV) and some other CSV layouts.
12 Nov, 2017Why Educational Tools
A common question I get, both directly and indirectly, is why do I spend so much time on what seem to be pretty limited educational apps rather than doing a full-on building analysis tool that can handle real projects. I documented this at the start of a recent research paper , but figured that I should probably summarise my reasons here as well.
21 Nov, 2015BIM and NatHERS Headaches
Given that my blog doesn't get updated much and there is no other obvious output, lots of people ask me what exactly I am working on at the moment and why it seems to be taking forever. Usually I just mutter the odd platitude, but today I thought I would combine a bit of a rant with an actual example of the kind of problems I am currently and seemingly constantly wrestling with. This one involves the ideal of determining NatHERS compliance directly from a fully integrated building information model (BIM).
20 Sep, 2009ACADIA 2009 Workshop
I will be presenting a research workshop at the ACADIA 2009 conference in Chicago on the 20th-21st of October 2009, to be held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The aim of this workshop is explore the boundaries of generative and performative design using Autodesk Ecotect Analysis, Green Building Studio and Revit.
07 Sep, 2009Master Class in Berlin
I will be presenting a master class at the Design Modelling Symposium in Berlin on the 5th-8th of October, 2009 at the Universität der Künste. This will cover the use of BIM data for a range of different types of performance analysis and the best ways to convert and transfer what you need.
18 Jun, 2009BS2009 Workshop
I will be presenting a 1-day workshop at the Building Simulation 2009 conference in Glasgow on Friday the 31st of July, 2009. This will cover the use of BIM data for a range of different types of performance analysis and the best ways to convert and transfer what you need.