Rocky Mountain InstitGreen Footstep Logoute has created an online carbon assessment tool called Green Footstep that helps architects, engineers, and developers understand how much a building contributes to global warming.

Green Footstep reveals the design targets required to achieve carbon neutrality, net zero site energy, and other goals, and can be used on residential and commercial new and retrofit building construction projects, from pre-design through occupancy.

With Green Footstep, builders can:

• Assesses the total building carbon footprint due to site development, construction, and operation;
• Helps designers and other project stakeholders set carbon emissions goals and design targets;
• Reveals the most effective levers that you can use to meet the Architecture 2030 Challenge, earn credits in green building rating systems, and achieve other goals; and
• Compliments a financial model (based on Life Cycle Cost Analysis) to provide the most comprehensive support for building design decisions.

Download the tool, read case studies and learn more at greenfootstep.org.

ecoScorecard, the technology platform that helps building product specifiers evaluate environmental attributes of products, revealed at the Greenbuilt in Phoenix the new ecoScorecard plug-in that works with Google SketchUp and provides a critical link between popular BIM (Building Information Modeling) tools and important environmental rating systems such as LEED.

The new integration will enable users to easily access environmental product attributes and rating system calculations for ecoScorecard enabled products that are in the Google 3D Warehouse, resulting in faster and more accurate rating system documentation for Google SketchUp users.

“The BIM process is built on the concept of coordinated information, and ecoScorecard takes that process a step further by providing an immediate to link to environmental product attributes and rating system calculations,” said Martin Flaherty, president of ecoScorecard. “Users can now pull data from ecoScorecard enabled products directly into the model and use that information throughout the design process.”

Introduced in 2007, ecoScorecard provides product specifiers with the ability to search and evaluate products based on environmental characteristics. The program does the calculations necessary for rating systems such as LEED, GGHC Labs 21, CHPS, and the NAHB Green Home Building Guidelines and includes and accounts for other third-party product certifications. The tool also produces the product documentation necessary for inclusion in the submission process. ecoScorecard is free to users and is supported by manufacturers interested in making the specification of green products easier for both their customers and their salespeople.

“Our original mission for ecoScorecard was to help make the specification of green products easier, and that has not changed,” explained Paul Shahriari, CEO of ecoScorecard. “Now, parallel to the growth of the green building movement, BIM is changing the entire building process. Never before has there been a single system that could provide context to all parties thinking about building. And the ecoScorecard technology platform is perfectly poised to link environmental product attributes and rating systems to BIM tools.”

Mr. Shahriari explained that ecoScorecard’s initial BIM integration was designed for Google SketchUp because of the accessibility and popularity of a Google tool. Plug-ins for other BIM tools such as Revit are slated for release next year.

For more information, visit http://ecoscorecard.com ..

“Saving energy isn’t a challenge that can wait for the future. It must be addressed today – for example, by initiatives to exchange information through generally accepted data formats like IFC and gbXML.
Watch this eSeminar how a 3D BIM model created in Bentley Architecture can serve for energy analysis by sharing it via gbXML for use in energy analysis programs and web services.”

Embodied carbon has been traditionally deemed optional in carbon emissions analyses for buildings because it was estimated to be of small magnitude compared with operational carbon (WRI, Build Carbon Neutral). This presentation will look at likely future scenarios and show how, in the pursuit of zero-carbon buildings by ever-reducing operational emissions, embodied carbon is likely to become one of the key metrics to address in whole-life building sustainability. Furthermore, in the anticipation of cap-and-trade schemes, a price on carbon will affect all parties in the building industry.

Click here to watch or download the recorded webinar (via design intelligence).

Here is some more insight into using SketchUp for Building Performance Simulation

These hands-on tutorials will help you, step-by-step, test drive a new set of 3D modeling and energy analysis tools: Open Studio, SketchUp and EnergyPlus. After viewing the videos, you may earn four hours of HSW Credit by taking a quiz on the peer learning site.

Downloadable Programs
Google Sketchup
Google Earth
EnergyPlus
OpenStudio

Hands-on Tutorials (Streaming Video)
Google SketchUp for Energy Analysis Using EnergyPlus
Google SketchUp, Part 1
Google SketchUp, Part 2
EnergyPlus, Part 1
EnergyPlus, Part 2

Session Handouts
Google SketchUp
EnergyPlus

Find out more at AIA/ Practicing Architecture

Researchers of the Sustainable Energy Research Group have developed a tool to generate world-wide climate change weather files for use with standard building performance simulation programs. The tool (CCWorldWeatherGen) is free of charge and can be downloaded from the SERG website.

The climate change world weather file generator (CCWorldWeatherGen) allows you to generate climate change weather files for world-wide locations ready for use in building performance simulation programs. It uses uses Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report model summary data of the HadCM3 A2 experiment ensemble which is available from the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (IPCC DDC). The tool is Microsoft Excel based and transforms ‘present-day’ EPW weather files into climate change EPW or TMY2 weather files which are compatible with the majority of building performance simulation programs.
It is highly recommended to read the user manual before using the tool.

find out more and download CCWorldWeatherGen ..

“The previous version of the Autodesk Green Building Studio service supported weather locations mainly based on large airport sites. The 1.6 million virtual weather locations now supported by the service are located no more than 8.8 miles (14 km) from any given project location covered by the new data set. The new virtual weather locations were developed using weather data from a variety of government and other public sources, such as airports, ocean or river buoys, and aircraft and satellite readings. An observations-based physics model (mesoscale meteorological model) was then generated for each region. Access to the 1.6 million virtual weather location data set is available now to subscribers of Autodesk Ecotect Analysis 2010 during the term of their Subscription.”

Via Autodesk Press Release ..

The Pharos Project connects you to a network of building professionals and manufacturers committed to transparency as a core value on the path to sustainability. Pharos is not a certification or label, it is information; the critical health and environmental data about the manufacture, use, and end of life of building materials specified and used every day all delivered in an easy to use web based tool.

Find more information here.

Tyson Ibele’s amazing free script will model and create complete cities, and even creates V-Ray Proxies and materials automatically.

Main Features:

• Wide variety of structural controls.
• Automated detail creation for things like windows, ledges, railings, balconies, etc.
• Ability to generate a series of randomized buildings along a spline path.
• Combined meshes can be turned into Vray Proxies during the generation process. The optimized view of vray proxies in the viewport allows for a much higher viewport framerate when displaying buildings. The better memory management for proxies allows for near limitless numbers of buildings in the scene.
• When you generate with path quick-build on, you can opt to “Re-use” the quick-built buildings. What this does is keep re-using the set of buildings you’ve already made in future path generations. So….it can greatly speed up the process of adding more buildings elsewhere in your scene by re-using one’s you’ve already generated instead of making new ones. Of course, if your quick-build value is low you’ll see building repetition, but if it’s high this option can be a real time saver without noticeable problems like repeating building patterns.

More info:

www.tysonibele.com/Main/BuildingGenerator/buildingGen.htm

Via Vray.info

Hot on the heels of the SketchUp 7.1 launch a couple of weeks ago, we’re pleased to announce the release of the latest addition to our 3D family: Google Building Maker is a super-specialized, online tool for creating buildings specifically for Google Earth.

Building Maker lets you choose a building to model by looking at aerial imagery. After you’ve told it what you’d like to model, Building Maker loads up several different aerial views of that building taken from different directions. You then align simple 3D shapes – boxes, prisms, pyramids and others – to the different views. Building Maker takes care of all the photo-texturing for you; it uses the aerial photos to “paint” your building when you save it. Models you create with Building Maker are stored in the Google 3D Warehouse, and are automatically considered for inclusion on the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. If your model looks good (and if there’s no better one already in its place), it’ll appear in Google Earth (for millions of people) within about a week.

Check out this video to see Building Maker in action:

We’re launching with 50 cities that are ready for Building Maker. We’ll continue to add cities as fast as we can, but feel free to jump in and give Building Maker a test drive whenever you like. Modeling in a place you’re not familiar with is a great way to learn something about it.

So is Building Maker supposed to replace SketchUp? Absolutely not! SketchUp is a general-purpose tool that people use to model everything under the sun. Building Maker, on the other hand, is a specialist. For folks who want to make models and see them in Google Earth, it’s simple, efficient and (we hope) downright fun.

Here’s something else we think is neat: Anything you create with Building Maker, you can download and open in SketchUp. You can tweak textures, refine geometry – whatever it takes to make your building even better. When you’re done, uploading your improved model to the 3D Warehouse further increases its chances of being accepted into Google Earth.

Some more things you should know about Building Maker:

• Building Maker is an online app, meaning it runs entirely in your web browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.).
• To get credit for what you contribute, you need to sign into your Google Account.
• Make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer.
• If you’re on a Mac, you need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.

Building Maker is free and available in 14 languages. Go to www.google.com/buildingmaker to join the worldwide mapping community. Have fun!

Via Google SketchUp Blog