Independent Study 2: Revit to Ecotect

Hannah and I started with an interest in how Revit can help to make a building sustainable.  We started to research sustainability and Revit eventually coming across two programs called IES and Ecotect that worked with a Revit model and had the ability to run analysis’ to determine various aspects of sustainability.  After researching both programs we decided Ecotect was the better choice.  Ecotect allows designers to run a quick analysis on their design in the earliest stages of conceptual design.  Instead of just displaying results in numbers and graphics Ecotect provides a visual and interactive display, a very nice feature especially for showing clients. 

We used the house project we built in the beginning of the year and learned how to export a Revit file as a gbXML file and then import it into Ecotect.  We ran into one problem in the importing phase, we got the error message that our house did not contain any rooms.  This is a crucial and easy step you must follow when preparing a Revit model for Ecotect, and we showed the steps in our blog.  After we got our house into Ecotect we decided to run a daylight analysis on our house.  This analysis shows in a colored grid areas of the house that get the most sunlight and areas of the house that may not get any sunlight at all.  Although our initial idea was to actually create a sustainable house, we ended up with a good understanding of the process in taking a Revit model and preparing it to be brought into Ecotect.  I think Ecotect has some very useful features that could quickly show off an aspect of architecture that was carefully thought out and usually only is explained with words. 

Kate