We have some heat map display styles available for certain attributes through Thematic Mapping. These apply to the situations they were designed for.
There are a host of other situations where heat map style symbology can be useful. James Manfield of SWECO raised one scenario; could CONNECT Edition Display Rules be used to colour code the carbon footprint of structural members based on the value stored in a custom DataGroup property?
Display Rules are applied by Display Styles. Currently they can apply a sub-set of 5 symbology attributes, in this context the colour override attribute is relevant; this is simple to use but limited.
More interesting is the Display Style Override option. This offers far more options for resymbolising elements. Any of the many display options available to a Display Style can be applied to elements specified by Display Rule Criteria.
Rather than creating sets of display styles for each case sets of generic colour map Display Styles can be created:
...in this example using a set of terracotta colours.
Save time by using online colour map generators such as Color Brewer 2.0. On this site you can pick a balanced set of colours generated by various parameters then paste the RGB values into Excel to generate a Color Book like the one illustrated above.
The chosen sets of colours can then be used in sets of Display Styles that are applied by the values in DataGroup properties including Custom properties such as that described in AECOsim Building Designer - Adding a DataGroup Property (Embodied CO2).