Export from AECOsim Energy Simulator

Rumor is that ABD SS6 will have the conceptual part of AES integrated with it. And, that's good news, especially for the Architects. That'll help during conceptual efforts, but you'll still need to purchase a full copy of AES if you want to perform full simulation (promote the conceptual design) for the HVAC engineer's analysis. It would still be great if the full AES was tightly integrated with HVAC.

Unknown said:

ABD SS6 will have the conceptual part of AES integrated with it. And, that's good news, especially for the Architects. That'll help during conceptual efforts

That is fabulous news, not before time - Adesk is already way down this route.

At last perhaps begining to see what Volker Mueller promised many years ago - built-in interractive tools for use during conceptual design, so things like the energy consequences of the current 'architectural' layout, orientation, fenestration, 'lossy' detail/shapes, materials etc can be easily weighed up 'on the fly', and the effect of ameliorative modifications can be instantly seen/reported.

Hopefully the range of these tools can extend in future to e.g. cost, sustainability/eco-footprint of materials, operations, excavation etc - and several more.

It always seemed to me that GC could play a part in this, if its form-finding could be modified to integrate non-graphical constraints e.g. cost, sustainability, energy alongside physical/graphical constraints.

Yes, well the integration of ADB and AES isn't quite the same as what's in the latest release of Revit. And Revit didn't have anything delivered with the product till the most recent release. Autodesk had been under attack for not integrating Vasari and Ecotect functionality earlier. In the case of Autodesk, they have essentially integrated Project Vasari into Revit for mass model (conceptual studies). In addition they use cloud calcs for more detailed analysis of a production (detail phase) model. From Vasari come a lot of built-in graphs to relay conceptual information than what is currently in AES.

What Bentley provides for conceptual design, and what I assume will be included in SS6, is more akin to the relationship with OpenStudio and its connection to Sketchup. And ABD will not have the more advanced design-development and detailed design phase analysis built in. For that, the indication was that folks will have to purchase a seat of AES. I can live with that, but in my mind that's not an ideal marketing position for Bentley.

It would much, much be better if the whole of AES was absorbed into ABD and tightly integrated with HVAC. And, I'd love to see more reports for portraying conceptual information and comparison between conceptual options. Visulizatio of the data is important, especially when showing clients their design. A picture is worth 10,000 spreadsheets. I'd also love to see something like OpenStudio's Parametric Analysis Tool (PAT) which can be used to spawn a series of design options and then compare them.

Also, when I make the comparison to OpenStudio, part of what I'm referring to is that the building form is generated using a layer-cake algorithm. Energy analysis of just pure massing of volumes isn't provided for in the current interface for AES. So your desire for a hook-up with GC would seem to be a way off yet. On the plus side, MicroStation already supported some of what was in Ecotect, such as the sun exposure calculator and solar shading, and these are based on simple surface elements so as tools they are quite flexible.