“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

As of On October 26th the newest build, V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4, is available from the download section of the Chaos Group site.

The upgrade is free of charge for all current V-Ray customers of Chaos Group.

The V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4 is compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 9, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2008, 3ds Max® 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max Design 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010.

The new V-Ray build supports both 32-bit and 64-bit OS.

Added new feature in V-Ray 1.50 SP4 is V-Ray Ambient Light.

It includes several modified features:

-  Improved multithreading on multi-core machines;
-  Ability to specify gizmo falloff for VRayEnvironmentFog;
-  Ability to use arbitrary meshes as gizmos for VRayEnvironmentFog;
-  Option to exclude the background from VRayEnvironmentFog;
-  Added CIE sky models to the VRaySun and VRaySky;
-  It is now possible to submit DR servers list for DR through backburner;
-  Added option to not use area speculars in the VRayIES light;
-  Added Kelvin temperature settings for the color of VRayLights;
-  VFB history is now turned off when 3ds Max is in slave mode;
-  Output .vrimg and split channel paths are listed in the Asset Tracker;
-  GI cache files (irradiance maps, light cache etc) are listed in the Asset Tracker.

The complete list with the improvements of the existing features can be found in the changelog file, which is a part of the installation.

The V-Ray® RT 1.50 Service Pack 1 is compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 9, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010.

The new V-Ray RT build supports both 32-bit and 64-bit OS.

The upgrade is free of charge for all current V-Ray customers of Chaos Group.
.
It includes the following new features:

- Support for the HSL/HSV controls of the ColorCorrect texture (as well as the map slots);
- Support for the “Additional bump” slot of the Normal bump texture;
- Some gamma workflows did not work well with the ActiveShade;
- Option to stop updating the ActiveShade window after a certain fixed amount of time;
- Support for region rendering in the ActiveShade window;
- The override material options from the standard V-Ray renderer to work properly;
- Support for environment override in VRayMtl;
- An option to manually restart V-Ray RT, without having to close & reopen the activeshade window/viewport;
- Option to pause the RT;
- Support for opacity maps of standard materials;
- Support for VRayEdgesTex in bump slot;
- Ability to directly export to a .vrscene from MaxScript without starting the ActiveShade (through the vrayExportRTScene() command);
- Access to the ActiveShade bitmap from MaxScript (through the vrayGetRTBitmap() command);
- Support for paletted PNG textures;
- Consider the “Hidden lights” switch from the standard V-Ray;
- Support for IFL file format for textures;
- Support the Shell Material in V-Ray RT.

The complete list of the new and improved features can be found in the changelog file, which is a part of the installation.

In order to explore the rendering opportunities of V-Ray RT you must have installed V-Ray 1.50.SP4 or a later version.

See these videos on some pretty cool features in the just released new version of ArchiCAD. ArchiCAD seams to be BIM leader in teamwork and user management / project access.  As well ArchiCAD improves performance with the introduction of  64-bit versions for Windows and soon on Macs too.

These are some of the new ideas:

Workflow through the new BIM Server

BIM Management: Data Safety

BIM Collaboration: Teamwork 2.0

Go to the Graphisoft channel on YouTube to see more or read these reviews on AECbytes or cadalyst ..

sdb consulting is offering two two-hour webinars on early design modeling and performance simulation using Revit and Ecotect. This is great news, more and more training and documentation appears on the Ecotect software following the aquisistion by Autodesk.

• Nov 13 @ 10AM PST – Integrating: Revit with Ecotect – 2 hours
• Nov 23 @ 10AM PST – Secrets of Revit Conceptual Massing – 2 hours

Integrating: Revit with Ecotect

Looking for ways to integrate sustainable design into your current workflow, or simply a way to work smarter? Perform analysis of building designs when it has the most potential rewards, during conceptual design. Seating is limited, so sign up today.

Topics Covered:

• Using Revit conceptual models
• Preparing a Revit project model
• Export options for gbXML
• Compelling reasons for exporting to DXF
• Optimum Ecotect import settings
• Considering site and weather conditions
• Applying parametric rules to Ecotect objects
• Performing early daylight and thermal analysis
• Iterative design and optioning

View the full course information, and sign up today at EventBrite.com

Secrets of: Revit Conceptual Massing

Revit Architecture 2010 has some very powerful conceptual design tools, but for those migrating from earlier versions of the software using these new tools can be daunting at first. If you want to understand how to create flexible, parametric building forms this class is for you. We will cover the essentials of the conceptual mass editing environment, as well as how to create sophisticated organic forms. Seating is limited, so sign up today.

Topics Covered:

• The Conceptual Design environment
• The Importance of building jigs
• Pros and Cons of choosing a modeling method
• Working with legacy massing objects
• From box to organic form
• Subtleties of the environment
• Surface rationalization
• Creating and extending panel families
• Extracting data for design analysis

View the full course information, and sign up today at EventBrite.com

Find out more via the Paradigm Shift blog ..

This video demonstrates the connection from ArchiCAD to IES via gbXML:

Read more on connecting ArchiCAD and IES on the IES website ..

These are overviews of VE-Ware that shows you how to access it, pull reports and how to use in everyday scenarios from within SketchUp and Revit.

Learn about climate change in this Google Earth introductory tour narrated by Al Gore, the first in a series of Google Earth tours leading up to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December. For more climate change tours, visit http://www.google.com/cop15

In order to understand more about what the human impact of high-end climate change might be, and, therefore, what would happen if a successful agreement can not be reached at Copenhagen, the the climate research team at the United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre has produced a map outlining some of the impacts that may occur if the global average temperature rises by 4 °C (7 °F) above the pre-industrial climate average.