What's new in Forma Building Design: Indoor Daylight, parking, furniture ...

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Forma Building Design, available in the AEC Collection, Revit standalone license, and Forma for Buildings bundle, helps architects explore more ideas before it’s time for BIM. Schematic design moves fast, and the questions it raises go beyond the building itself. How much natural light will the spaces get? Do the parking stalls actually fit? Can the drawing you started in Building Design be exported to AutoCAD? Since our July update, we’ve released a set of improvements to Forma Building Design that help you solve these tasks earlier, while changes are still easy to make. Here’s what’s new in our schematic design software. Test natural light with Indoor Daylight Indoor Daylight gives you rapid insight into how your current design gets access to natural light during occupied hours over a typical year. The analysis is now in public beta and available to all Forma Building Design users. You’ll find it in the analysis panel, in both 3D and floor plan view. Select the daylight analysis, then Indoor Daylight and the analysis starts automatically, so there’s nothing to set up. It joins the other analyses built into Forma Building Design, including sun hours and daylight potential for facades and windows, so you can build a fuller picture of light in your design before you move into Revit. Move between Forma Building Design and AutoCAD Many architects work in AutoCAD alongside other tools. Two updates make it easier to move between AutoCAD and Forma Building Design without redrawing your work. Bring your AutoCAD drawing in. Import a DXF into the floor plan and trace over it to build your plan. Keep designing in Forma Building Design, then either decide to upgrade to a BIM model in Revit, or export it back to AutoCAD. Import currently supports DXF files. Export to AutoCAD. We know some of our customers still prefer the reliable workflows that AutoCAD offer, so now you can take a floor plan design from Forma Building Design into AutoCAD as a DWG file, so you can continue working on your model instead of redrawing it from scratch. The export also gives you clean floor plan drawings you can take into illustration tools for presentation. You control which buildings, components, labels, and units go into each export, so you can tailor the file to the job: a fuller export to continue technical design, or a lighter one for polished floor plan drawings. Lay out parking in the floor plan Parking requirements are easy to assume and harder to measure. Parking in Forma Building Design lets you see how many stalls actually fit and how much floor area they take up. Find the new Parking button in the floor plan toolbar. It includes parking spots and entrances. Copy or edit a parking type to set its width, depth, accessible and EV markings, and access aisle. Then place your layout: • Drop spots one by one, or drag out a row. • Pull a handle off a selection to repeat it. • Rely on snapping to walls, grid lines, and columns. Spots highlight wherever they overrun the floor or overlap. Garage doors sit under the same button, and you place them with the regular door tool. Totals by type feed into the area metrics panel, and the DXF export carries parking on its own layer. Add furniture to see the scale of your spaces Furniture helps you read the scale and experience of the spaces you design, in plan and in 3D. In the floor plan. Open the floor plan view and find Furniture in the toolbar. Add pieces from the dropdown, or pop out the menu to keep it at hand. Some furniture scales freehand, some with a linked width and length, and some generatively. Make a table wider, for example, and chairs are added to it. Furniture is also included in the Revit export as families or as blocks in DWGs of course. In 3D. Place furniture in the floor plan, then switch to the 3D view to take a look. For a closer inspection, try the exploded view, or toggle the roof layer from the Layers menu. Design with confidence, earlier Together, these updates bring questions that usually wait until later into the schematic design phase: how much light a space gets, whether parking works, how big a room feels, and how your design connects to AutoCAD. That’s more problems you can solve in one place, before BIM. Frequently Asked Questions What is Indoor Daylight in Forma Building Design?   Indoor Daylight is an analysis in Forma Building Design that shows how your current design has access to natural light during occupied hours over a typical year. It’s in public beta and available to all Forma Building Design users. You’ll find it in the analysis panel in both 3D and floor plan view, and it starts automatically when you select it. Can I import an AutoCAD drawing into Forma Building Design?   Yes. You can import a DXF file into the floor plan in Forma Building Design and trace over it to build your plan. Import currently supports DXF files. When you’re done designing, you can bring the design back to AutoCAD. Can I export a Forma Building Design model to AutoCAD?   Yes. Forma Building Design exports a building design to AutoCAD as a DWG file, so you can continue working on your model without redrawing it. You choose which buildings, components, labels, and units go into each export, so you can create a fuller file for technical design or a lighter one for floor plan drawings. How do I add parking to a floor plan in Forma Building Design?   Open the floor plan view and select the Parking button in the toolbar. Set the width, depth, accessible and EV markings, and access aisle for a parking type, then drop spots one by one, drag out a row, or pull a handle off a selection to repeat it. Spots snap to walls, grid lines, and columns, and totals by type appear in the area metrics panel.