Doing screen grabs seems like the only way to get images out, but fear not, there is a better way! If you walked around the Architectural Association summer show a few years ago all you’d see was rows and rows of meaningless tiny black rectangles.
#Ecotect weather data file plus#
epw which is the energy plus weather data format. wea files are delivered with the basic ecotect install, but there are heaps more on the web site downloads/weatherdata there is also information there about importing weather data from other formats like. It is a weather data viewer, however that description doesn’t really do it justice, it would be better to describe it as a tool for understanding climates. This To inspect the weather data, use the is a separate application that comes with Ecotect. LATITUDE: -34.9° NAME: Ad e la id e 138.6° LOCATION: So uth Austra lia LONGITUDE: DESIGN SKY: No t Av a ila b le TIMEZONE: +9.5 hrs ALTITUDE: 20.5 m Not all data sets are complete, and not all of them are very good. The most important thing to remember is to be suspicious of your weather data, and to use a bit of common sense when interpreting it. (C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Ecotect\Weather Data by default.) It only displays the ones that you have saved in the default weather data folder, so if you have more data files, put them in there. On the right, there is a list of weather data files.
We shall see later when we get onto sunlight studies how useful it can be to see a whole day’s solar activity in a matter of seconds, but for the moment, we are interested in an even greater level of abstraction for the moment. Initially this sounds like a poor substitute, and alone it probably would be, but used in concert with traditional site visits, it can be very enlightening. These days we’re all too busy and stressed to actually go outside, so we can make a simulation of what it might be like to be there. Traditionally (not being that old, I’m guessing here) architects would get a ‘feel’ for the climate of a site by actually going there, probably on several different occasions, and at different times to see how the sun fell on the site, or how it changed through the seasons. In this window you can navigate (either pan for 2d views, or orbit for 3d) with the right mouse button, and zoom with the wheel. In the middle, is the display of the data. There are a range of different ways to view the data on the left, along with controls to affect the way it is displayed. Once it has started up, it will show the Location data graphs. If you click that it gives you the option to copy the graph (the black bit of the screen) to the clip board, either as a Bitmap - which is essentially a ready trimmed screen grab (bah, no good), or as a Metafile - which is a vector graphic format (yay, really useful). In the bottom left of the window there is a button that looks like a camera. If your graphs are too smooth, the odds are that the data has been interpolated between relatively few readings. You should be looking for a reasonably ‘lumpy’ set of data. It doesn’t need to be exactly where the site is, but the nearer the better. Get some weather data The first thing that we need to get hold of is some weather data from a source somewhere near the site. It will be in the Autodesk > Ecotect folder. You can launch the weather manager from the Start menu. we are going to work through some really really fundamental things that are area specific, then once we’ve done that we can start on the site specific stuff in Ecotect. It might seem odd, but the first thing that we are going to do is to not start Ecotect. a much more complete explanation is available from the ecotect help files. I’m only going to give a very quick overview of each of these tools to whet your appetite. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just gives the impression of less reliable data, so if you are happy with the legitimacy of your source, then that’s fine. As this data comes essentially for free1, it’s a big help at the beginning of a project. Much of this is quite specific, and makes you feel like you got something for your money from those five years of study, but there is quite a lot, especially environmental information, that can be gathered quite mechanically. Ecotect for site analysis Before even thinking about the brief, or some initial forms, there is a lot of information to be gathered from the site.
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