What is Insight?

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Let's start by reviewing the basics of energy modeling and building performance simulation.

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So, what is energy modeling?

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Energy modeling is a tool for measuring building performance.

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The goal of an energy simulation is to help you visualize the impact of your building form and configuration on its energy content.

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Most of the energy modeling applications were built using the Department of Energy 2.2 or the Energy plus modeling engine.

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Now, these tools used to be very difficult to use and were really the domain of specialists.

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Needless to say, they were not very user friendly intended to be used later in the design process,

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because you needed very specific information about the project.

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That's not true anymore.

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There is a host of new tools that were designed specifically for architects and designers,

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and are meant to be used during the early design stages.

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Autodesk's Insight is one such tool.

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Insight is a cloud-based building performance tool and it is accessible directly from Revit from the analyzed Revit.

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Using Insight, you can calculate your building's energy costs based on certain criteria.

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Insight also provides comparisons of your building against baseline standards such as Ashray 90.1,

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and the architecture 2030 standard.

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What's great about Insight is that it visualizes key performance indicators.

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These are things like window to wall ratio, the wall construction, HVAC efficiency, et cetera.

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You can change these values in real time.

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So, you can see how they would impact your energy costs.

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Insight saves each model.

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So, you can compare different configurations which is really useful in early design stages.

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So, here's the scenario we're going to work with, you're designing an office building for a company that values sustainability

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and it wants a high-performance building for their headquarters.

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In fact, the client wants to meet the architecture of 2030 standards.

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Now, you're in the concept phase and you want to test different building configurations and orientations,

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so you can better understand the performance impacts such things have on the building.

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And you want to do this before you get too far along the design process.

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So, we're going to start with massing models in Revit.

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And then we're going to bring those models into Insight for some quick analysis.