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AEC Newsletter archive:
Geoffrey Moore Langdon
CADENCE AEC Tech News # 46 (March 15, 2001)
AEC Tech News 3/15/01
In This Issue:
VectorWorks 9
DataCAD 9.05
Buzzsaw free no more
Building Engineering Tech - Solar and Energy Analysis Software
VectorWorks 9
The flagship core of a whole line of CADD offerings based on VectorWorks has just been upgraded with a major new version, including greater accuracy (64-bit floating point), 3D freeform curves (NURBS) and Extrude-along-a-Path, faster video speed on both Macintosh and Windows (OpenGL) and even a built in spelling checker. Nemetschek NA also fixed and improved a number of other features so that now there are toolbar shortcuts, better printing approaches, and import/export of AutoCAD 2000i files. The photorendering add-on called RenderWorks was also improved with more lighting, materials and transparency effects and is now twice as fast as the previous version.
AutoCAD PaperSpace Layouts come in as scaled classes, and VectorWorks layer links now export as blocks. Just as other flavors of AutoCAD have a compatibility problem with ACIS solids and the proprietary ARX entities of ArchitecturalDesktop, VectorWorks does too, so those entities still need to be exploded. VW9 is currently being "carbonized" (the term for optimizing it to run with multiple processors on Mac OS X systems) and that version is expected as a interim update in two months. Check out the full list of new features at the link below.
DataCAD 9.05
Just days after announcing DataCAD 9.04, the company released DataCAD 9.05 - a free download to DataCAD 9 owners at http://www.datacad.com/support/down/DataCAD905Eng.exe. Apparently there was some kind of serious fault they needed to fix urgently, but to make up for it, they actually included a new feature - an internal Spelling Checker.
Buzzsaw free no more
The long anticipated "shoe-drop" of the end of free extranet service at Buzzsaw.com has happened, so using the service is now between $1000 and $8600 per year depending on options you choose.
Building Engineering Tech
- Solar and Energy Analysis Software
This week, some notes on yet another area of AEC Tech particularly in honor of the passing of Professor Ian McHarg at 80, who essentially started the environmental movement with his book "Design With Nature" and the first Earth Day 31 years ago April 22. For "green" architects and builders the best organization - encompassing a huge range of high and low tech approaches from sustainability, to passive solar construction, to photovoltaics, and much more - is the American Solar Energy Society - ASES, which each year hosts hundreds of workshops and seminars on how to actually use things like architectural glass that also happens to generate electricity. This year their conference/expo is in Washington, DC April 21-25. The New England regional chapter of ASES is having their conference this week (March 21 - 24) at Tufts College in Boston. Interesting that though "solar energy" is actually a subset of sustainability and environmentalism it was ASES - with its practical and technical how-to really solve problems approach that has come to encompass all these widely varying building technologies.
The granddaddy of building energy analysis software remains DOE-2 developed by the US Dept of Energy, and many of us cringe at our memory of using stacks of fortran cards to run DOE-2 in the early 70's. Today there are over 200 building energy analysis programs - ranging from interactive web sites to stand alone programs to various easier-to-use shell interfaces to feed the right information into DOE-2 and graph the results. Constructing a complete and custom building thermal network analysis simulation is still regarded as the most accurate way to figure out building energy flows, but that has proven challenging enough that only graduate students tend to do it. The dream has always been to link architectural CADD models with real energy analysis - once it is easy and automatic THEN solar and energy would become real building design shaping factors for architects.
Current energy analysis software - updated for Win98/2000 and Mac OS - which architects and AEC Tech people find most useful are :
ENERGY-10, which helps designers quickly identify the most cost-effective, energy-saving measures for small commercial and residential buildings, including daylighting, passive solar heating, and high-efficiency mechanical systems.
SOLAR 5 designed by architects at UCLA (updated in June 2000) and is free.
EnergyPlus - a kind of easier DOE-2 light. There is currently a job opening for a DCAL Programmer to link EnergyPlus with DataCAD, contact Michael Andelman, in Newton, MA, at andelman@jrma-ae.com.
SolArch, a free download software with useful info for architects on their designs.
Quickee 1.0, is an Excel spreadsheet interface to DOE-2 available as a free download.
Green Building XML
Announced first in AEC Tech news #27 last year, GeoPraxis may be leading the way with a new XML standard that encompasses not only architectural info - walls, windows, doors - but information relevant for energy analysis, such as wall orientations, r-values, location, glazing, and mass materials. Hopefully all architectural CADD programs will support this gbXML, as DesignWorkshop currently does.
CADLink HVAC and Energy Analysis
As a solar engineer (yet another of my hats) I could barely contain myself when the Englishmen from Cymap (a newly acquired division of Graphisoft) demonstrated what the mis-named CADLink could do during our introduction to ArchiCAD 7 in Budapest two months ago. As their software does sooo many different things and they put it in the category of HVAC which architects in particular kind-of skip over, the real abilities of this software sometimes get buried. Though it will also work with transfers from AutoCAD and MicroStation, it has a bi-directional smart link with ArchiCAD so that everything is virtually automatic for ArchiCAD using architects - solar energy analysis, heat loss/gain, lighting/daylighting analysis - and - all the HVAC system selection automatic duct/pipe sizing and so on. I was stunned as they did a weeks worth of my engineering work in seconds - producing isobar lighting charts on the plan, daily temperature graphs, optimized glazing sizes, energy consumption calculations, and lots more.
I wish Professor McHarg could have seen it.
Links :
VectorWorks : http://www.nemetschek.net
Full list of new features in VectorWorks 9 : http://www.architecturalcadd.com/hotnews/vectorworks9.htm
DataCAD 9.05 : http://www.datacad.com/support/down/DataCAD905Eng.exe
Buzzsaw : http://www.buzzsaw.com
ASES : http://www.ases.org
ASES 2001 Conference : http://www.solarenergyforum.org
NESEA Building Energy conference at Tufts : http://www.nesea.org
Earth Day : http://www.earthday.net
ENERGY-10 : http://www.nrel.gov/buildings/energy10
SOLAR 5 : http://www.aud.ucla.edu/energy-design-tools
SolArch : http://www.kahl.net/solarch
Quickee : http://www.geopraxis.com
Complete List of Energy Software : http://www.eren.doe.gov/buildings/tools_directory
Green Building XML : http://www.geopraxis.com
CADLink : http://www.cymap.com/products
Ian McHarg : http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/03/07/obituaries/O-PMCHA07.htm
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About Geoffrey Moore Langdon, AIA
Prof. Langdon is a registered architect and is the principal of Architectural CADD Consultants, a firm that specializes in helping architectural firms with computing and CADD. He has taught Design, Solar Energy, and Architectural CADD at a number of colleges in the Boston area. He is the author of Architectural CADD: A Resource Guide to Design and Production Software Appropriate for Architects, a guest speaker at many AIA events, and the founder and organizer of the Designers 3D CAD Shootout competition. contact him at aectechnews@architecturalcadd.com, or through his website: http://www.architecturalcadd.com
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