Starting to Clean Up For the Break

I am starting to clear up some open issues before the break. Here are a few that I can handle right here and now:

I will obviously not be able to magically transform the entire backlog of interesting topics I still wish to share and discuss.

Still, I am continuously learning to be active and still take things easy, do what I do, not think too much, just act.

Here is a nice little anecdote to illustrate the principle:

A new Zen monk has just been admitted to the monastery.

He pays his respects to the master and says: "I'm new to the monastery, please show me the way."

The master asks, "Have you had breakfast?"

The novice replies, "Yes, just a moment ago."

"Then go and wash your eating bowl."

By the way, I wondered whether to use commas or colons in the lines above, and found a conclusive answer in the Grammar Monster discussion of quotation marks for quotes: "use commas for quotations that comprise fewer than 7 words and use colons for longer quotations". I did not know that before. Thank you, Grammar Monster.

Autodesk University Classes Ready for Viewing and Download

The AU class materials and recordings are now available for viewing and download from au.autodesk.com.

The search tool returns this year's classes as well as previous ones from 2011 and 2012.

Here are the results of searching for my classes:

By the way, talking about AU, and what with the festive season and all, here is a picture of me at AU with a pretty big and festive bird:

The big festive peacock

Building Performance Analysis Update

I mentioned the Building Performance Analysis blog at autodesk.typepad.com/bpa last year.

The BPA team have completed a number of exciting projects since then.

Thanks to them, Revit 2014 now offers an entirely new way to create an Energy Analysis Model or EAM automatically from Revit building elements, as explained in their following discussions:

If you are already working with the Revit Energy Analysis model or are interested in determination of realistic volumes of rooms and spaces for any purpose whatsoever, this is a topic you absolutely must dive into.

For starters, read the detailed explanation From BIM to BPA: What is an Energy Analysis Model (EAM)?

Expect more in this area!

Daylighting Analysis Tool for Revit Update

One of the BPA tools is the recently announced Daylighting Analysis Tool for Revit, which was just now updated and released for global distribution.

The Revit 2014 Daylighting Analysis plug-in uses the Autodesk 360 Rendering cloud service to perform very fast and physically accurate daylighting analyses from within Revit. In the current first release of the plug-in, it provides LEED IEQc8.1 2009 results for most models in less than 15 minutes.

Here is the detailed BPA presentation of daylighting as a service.

The features provided by the new update include:

You can download the technology preview from Autodesk Labs: Download Daylighting Analysis Tool for Revit.