Multi-level ground planes

[Anonymous]

Hi,

As a HVAC and plumbing engineering company, we are using MEP to calculate heating & cooling loads and build HVAC & plumbing systems.

One of the heating & cooling load analysis inputs is "ground level", which defines underground surfaces. Ground is selected from planar elevation levels. Obviously, most of the buildings (especially in Turkey) has no planar ground surfaces. As a result, some open-to-air surfaces including windows or doors are counted as underground surfaces. This effects the load calculations; loads are lowered about 5 times, which makes the calculation useless.

If there is an available solution, I would kindly ask any experienced guy to share with me. If there is no such a way, we ask Autodesk to add this feature.

Regards,

Burç GÜNERİ

Mechanical Engineer

[asommer]

To take it a step further, Autodesk, how about an option to "Select" a surface for a ground plane, or "Create" a ground plane?  I don't use the load calcs for a lot of reasons, and this is one.  Quite a few buildings are not built on absolutely flat sites.  Revit should be able to read the Topography the Civil or Arch gives us.