Revit Architecture to IES Workflow

The IES Revit VE (Virtual Environment) Toolkits are ideal for use at the very early stages of the design process to provide quick assessment options for architects and engineers alike.

At early stages in projects up to 70% of the design decisions which affect performance have been made. The Sustainability Toolkit, performs the sustainable design analysis that is so important at these early concept stages – energy use, carbon use, daylighting and solar performance. Helping the design team establish the most appropriate sustainable and energy efficient approach. The following steps provide a quick guide to installing, setting up your Revit model and utilising the IES VE Toolkits.

Installation:

1. Download the plug-in from IES, currently in Beta

2. Ensure applications are closed

3. Remove via Control Panel IES if it exists.

4. Install V:\Other\IES\2007-12-12 IES Toolkit for Revit\ve5850.exe

5. The following tool bar appears in Revit

Preparing Revit model:

1. Add Room objects to your project.
2. It is important that the Rooms in Revit are built correctly and bounding on all sides, otherwise the results will not be accurate. For full details see this IES guide.
3. In Revit select Settings > Room and Areas Settings > and turn on “Compute Room Volumes”
4. Save project

Using the plug-in

1. Select > Set Model Properties, this may take a few seconds to load
2. Switch to Building Type tab
3. Select default room construction
4. Select building services system
5. Select place and location
6. Switch to Rooms tab
7. You are then able to override the room construction and room services system (this can be left as default for initial run)
8. Use left mouse button to orbit model (unlike shift and mouse wheel in Revit!)
9. Select > Check Model…and Review the IES Report (if issues exist return to Revit to fix)
10. After Check of Model is OK, check “I have checked the model is suitable for analysis”
11. Select OK, this returns to Revit
12. Select Toolkit
13. Run the LEED Toolkit to get results. IES LEED Toolkit features (Other Toolkits can be run too)

Suggestions:

Start of with a really small project, maybe only a couple of rooms and really understand what is being analysed and how changes in your model are being reported by the IES analysis tools.

Try File >Export > gbXML first to check your rooms are complete. (IES uses gbXML from Revit Architecture)

Questions:

How does IES know the north rotation - as at no time did I specify this, I assume it uses project north and ignores Revit true north if set in the project?