12
May
2011
Ecotect tutorial
I made this a really long time ago, and it still isn’t finished, but it woul’d be better for the world if it was out there making people happy (what rot).
I’ve been working on an Ecotect training document for a while, it is still a work in progress, but see what you think so far. Ecotect for site analysis
as it is a work in progress, if you want to put notes on the tutorial and send it back, that’d be very much appreciated!
I snuck it onto the tutorials page a while ago, but I didn’t announce it. If there is enough enthusiasm in the comments I’ll carry on working on it.
21
Apr
2009
granularity
I’ve been telling people that turning up the analysis resolution on their Ecotect models is a bad idea, but I’d never stopped to figure out just how bad.
This table shows the rate at which the numbers grow as you go up through the resolution steps.
| Sky subdivision |
Lowest |
Low |
Medium |
High |
Highest |
|
| Grid subdivisions | Number of divisions |
144 | 324 | 1296 | 2700 | 8100 |
| Low – 1 | 1 | 144 | 324 | 1296 | 2700 | 8100 |
| Medium 5 x5 | 25 | 3600 | 8100 | 32400 | 67500 | 202500 |
| High – 10 x 10 | 100 | 360000 | 810000 | 3240000 | 6750000 | 20250000 |
| Full – 25 x 25 | 625 | 225000000 | 506250000 | 2025000000 | 4218750000 | 12656250000 |
For those of you who are a bit rusty on your powers of ten (like me), that bottom right number is 12.5 billion! That’s for each panel, so if you have a 5×5 subdivision on a grid, that’d be into the trillions of calcs for your analysis. No wonder it takes a long time.
I thought I’d check to see if I was supposed to be using British billions, or American billions, and it turns out (Long_and_short_scales) that all billions have been the same in the English speaking world since 1974!
3
Apr
2009
Go Kawakita’s thesis – genetic algorithms in ecotect
Go Kawakita now works for Foster & Partners, but last year I was one of his thesis supervisors when he was doing his masters in energy efficient & sustainable design at Oxford Brookes.
His thesis was about the use of evolutionary algorithms to explore design options, more specifically with evaluation driven by environmental parameters. His project work was focused around finding widow configurations that satisfied certain lighting criteria, using ecotect analysis as the fitness evaluation.
He doesn’t have any server space, so I’m putting his work up here.
this is the thesis pdf (low res raster images for small file)
15
Dec
2007
ok ok, i suck
right, I’ve been awake for 20 hours now, and i’m showing no signs of slowing down, a double hit of modafinil at 5:30 today showed it’s usual 16 hour hill, but thanks to a big sugary hit of hot chocolate hit, i’m bouncing like loon to solid steel radio (the savior of my sanity during my third year of degree, but foolishly forgotten)
My trip to RMIT is all on now, and it all hinges about gettign the correct forms filled in and sent to the right people, but with very little guidance, and an 11 hour time difference at play it’s tricky, I should be going some time in January, and the couple of weeks to get my head around the city, and all the prime coffee.
I was teaching a UEL again today, this time I wasn’t Josh’s little bitch, preping his students for his full on assault while he parties at weddings in LA, it was my show, and despite the usual pre-terror, it all came together (i think). We bashed into a bit of LUA scripting for ecotect, and the scripts we covered are living on the ceca wiki now.
Given that the term doesn’t start at RMIT until the 3rd of March, i’ve finally got a chance to get all the litte bits tied up that i’ve had on my task list for years and years. all the little stuff, like doing the image credits on my degree dissertation, and designing my dad’s house that i really ought to have done ages ago, but have been dragging my heels. I’ve also got an absolutely massive pile of books that i’ve been buying from amazon and then not finishing to much through.
so it’s all about trying to resolve my work life balance to the point where there is much more life involves from now on!
1
Nov
2007
ETSDL
Go Kawakita is doing a masters at Brookes as a part of their MSc in Energy Efficient and Sustainable Building program, and as his thesis subject is so similar to mine, I’m tutoring him a bit.
He’s going to be prolifically blogging about what he’s doing on his blog, ETSDL.
Keep coming back, as it should be interesting! (Hopefully he’ll make it look a bit nicer soon though!)