A few feature requests from an avid Forma-user

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

I love Forma. However, I believe there are a few things that can be easily improved on. Here is a feature "wish list" I have compiled:

1. There should be an option where “line buildings” adapt to the levels of the terrain.
2. For residential projects I really miss the autogenerated floorplans Forma-Classic had in its building volumes. These instant suggestions on how many units and so on, can sometimes be really time saving.
3. Editing terrain levels is not intuitive and should follow the same type of user interface as other tools in Forma.
4. I’d like to be able to edit the level of the top surface of a constraints to "meters above sealevel", not just relative to the constraints bottom surface.
5. An IFC-export option would be really nice to have again, in order to more easily transfer designs between non-Autodesk programs..
6. The previous functions of Classic-Forma of “View to area”, “Terrain-steepness analysis” and “Outdoor area-metrics” is dearly missed.
7. Finally, been able to add some abstract scale-figures of people would be great. The absence of windows and doors in building volume-concept often make it hard to get a good idea of the scale of the buildings.

Also a few region-specific requests:

1. I’d love a good tutorial on adding Rail-traffic data using Norwegian-data.
2. When sketching a floorplan the “unit types” cores and corridors should automatically not be linked to the area-metrics that indicate “non-saleable” area (in Norway: BRA-i, previously BRA-s).

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

I love Forma. However, I believe there are a few things that can be easily improved on. Here is a feature "wish list" I have compiled:

1. There should be an option where “line buildings” adapt to the levels of the terrain.
2. For residential projects I really miss the autogenerated floorplans Forma-Classic had in its building volumes. These instant suggestions on how many units and so on, can sometimes be really time saving.
3. Editing terrain levels is not intuitive and should follow the same type of user interface as other tools in Forma.
4. I’d like to be able to edit the level of the top surface of a constraints to "meters above sealevel", not just relative to the constraints bottom surface.
5. An IFC-export option would be really nice to have again, in order to more easily transfer designs between non-Autodesk programs..
6. The previous functions of Classic-Forma of “View to area”, “Terrain-steepness analysis” and “Outdoor area-metrics” is dearly missed.
7. Finally, been able to add some abstract scale-figures of people would be great. The absence of windows and doors in building volume-concept often make it hard to get a good idea of the scale of the buildings.

Also a few region-specific requests:

1. I’d love a good tutorial on adding Rail-traffic data using Norwegian-data.
2. When sketching a floorplan the “unit types” cores and corridors should automatically not be linked to the area-metrics that indicate “non-saleable” area (in Norway: BRA-i, previously BRA-s).

[marthe.brondbo]

Hello @bjarni.thorgrimsson!
Long time no see!!! Thank you so much for this - great points and requests (and some of them should not be far away...). We´ll make sure we get as many developer eyes on this as possible! 
And - let us know next time you are in Oslo (you are still in Iceland I assume?), we are moving into new offices soon and would love to catch up and show you our new home! 🤗
Marthe

[marthe.brondbo]

Hello @bjarni.thorgrimsson!
Long time no see!!! Thank you so much for this - great points and requests (and some of them should not be far away...). We´ll make sure we get as many developer eyes on this as possible! 
And - let us know next time you are in Oslo (you are still in Iceland I assume?), we are moving into new offices soon and would love to catch up and show you our new home! 🤗
Marthe

[jesper.staahl · Accepted solution]

Hey Bjarni! Thanks for this list; they're all really valid feedbacks! I think I can help you with some of your points immediately, and I'll add the rest to our feedback system immediately! 

1. Line buildings adapting to terrain: Added to feedback, agree we should bring it back at some point, but there are several use cases where it's not desirable; we'd need some options here, I think.

2. As a fellow Norwegian architect, I do too, but the units we suggested made very little sense outside of the Nordics! Even switching markets from a buyers market in Norway ,to a renters market in Finland changed the dynamics of what sizes and units was most desireable.. Imagine then having to cover archetypes for all the states of the US, France, Japan and Australia as well? So instead, to be more scaleable you're now able to draw your typical floorplans in the floor plan tool and apply them as template to any future projects. We covered this workflow in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqbxCcQOXj4 note: you can add your "typical floor plans" to your Forma Hub, and reuse it over and over in all your projects. If your studio takes an hour on a Friday to workshop with some baked goods and a coffee you can set up templates for most of your desired templates! Highly recommended.

3. Agree, and site design is a focus area for Forma going forward, keep an eye out for new Betas and tools here in the future!

4. Top level constraints in MASL, totally agree, I'll kick that back to the team immediately, in fact I had a conversation about the importance for us architects to work in context and relative to terrain and sea level as late as last Friday!

5. In general our native export capabilities are underprioritized right now, but keep your eye out for new ways of exporting data in the future. For now, the recommended workflow is a quick stop by Revit to export IFCs. Autodesk is committed to the OpenBIM movement as an ideal, and we want Forma to be better at this!

6. Totally agree. For view to area, keep an eye on the extension store going forward. For terrain steepness there is a dynamo script that does this in Forma, let me dig around and see if I can't find it for you.. It's not a native capability but it's a great proof of concept. For Outdoor area in Norway I got great news, have you tried the Naviate Outdoor Area analysis in Forma? It does just about everything Classic Forma did and way more. In general this is a trend you'll continue to see in Forma, that local adaptation of "core analyses" may be developed as extensions by partners such as Symetri. 

7. Agree, my colleague Arne often populates his models with low poly scale humans, easy enough to do manually with a quick import, but it'd be nice to have them populate the model automatically and be ignored by analysis, just to give a sense of scale. This actually is a great idea for an extension.. "Entourage in Forma" or something! 

Re: Region specific questions (I hope you now see that some of the above definitively also are region specific)
1. For rails in Norway, have you read this: https://help.autodeskforma.com/autodeskforma/en/articles/7833234-the-technology-behind-the-noise-ana... and this: https://help.autodeskforma.com/autodeskforma/en/articles/4532011-how-to-find-traffic-data-for-specif... it's a bit fiddly, but with "typical lengths" of trains, and a time-table you can get a pretty good estimate going!

2.  For the Floor plan, it it's current state it doesn't estimate BRA-i nor BRA-s in Norway, it just naively gives you a area of the unit as if the walls are 0 thickness. In the Area metric - units, you can get a BRA-s breakdown that assumes BRA-s = 0.9xBRA. Now this can be customized and adjusted according to your needs (at this early sketch stage) and yea we should probably replace that standard to BRA-i now that this is implemented, I'll give that feedback to the team. The templates available are mostly there to inspire users to what can be done!

[jesper.staahl · Accepted solution]

Hey Bjarni! Thanks for this list; they're all really valid feedbacks! I think I can help you with some of your points immediately, and I'll add the rest to our feedback system immediately! 

1. Line buildings adapting to terrain: Added to feedback, agree we should bring it back at some point, but there are several use cases where it's not desirable; we'd need some options here, I think.

2. As a fellow Norwegian architect, I do too, but the units we suggested made very little sense outside of the Nordics! Even switching markets from a buyers market in Norway ,to a renters market in Finland changed the dynamics of what sizes and units was most desireable.. Imagine then having to cover archetypes for all the states of the US, France, Japan and Australia as well? So instead, to be more scaleable you're now able to draw your typical floorplans in the floor plan tool and apply them as template to any future projects. We covered this workflow in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqbxCcQOXj4 note: you can add your "typical floor plans" to your Forma Hub, and reuse it over and over in all your projects. If your studio takes an hour on a Friday to workshop with some baked goods and a coffee you can set up templates for most of your desired templates! Highly recommended.

3. Agree, and site design is a focus area for Forma going forward, keep an eye out for new Betas and tools here in the future!

4. Top level constraints in MASL, totally agree, I'll kick that back to the team immediately, in fact I had a conversation about the importance for us architects to work in context and relative to terrain and sea level as late as last Friday!

5. In general our native export capabilities are underprioritized right now, but keep your eye out for new ways of exporting data in the future. For now, the recommended workflow is a quick stop by Revit to export IFCs. Autodesk is committed to the OpenBIM movement as an ideal, and we want Forma to be better at this!

6. Totally agree. For view to area, keep an eye on the extension store going forward. For terrain steepness there is a dynamo script that does this in Forma, let me dig around and see if I can't find it for you.. It's not a native capability but it's a great proof of concept. For Outdoor area in Norway I got great news, have you tried the Naviate Outdoor Area analysis in Forma? It does just about everything Classic Forma did and way more. In general this is a trend you'll continue to see in Forma, that local adaptation of "core analyses" may be developed as extensions by partners such as Symetri. 

7. Agree, my colleague Arne often populates his models with low poly scale humans, easy enough to do manually with a quick import, but it'd be nice to have them populate the model automatically and be ignored by analysis, just to give a sense of scale. This actually is a great idea for an extension.. "Entourage in Forma" or something! 

Re: Region specific questions (I hope you now see that some of the above definitively also are region specific)
1. For rails in Norway, have you read this: https://help.autodeskforma.com/autodeskforma/en/articles/7833234-the-technology-behind-the-noise-ana... and this: https://help.autodeskforma.com/autodeskforma/en/articles/4532011-how-to-find-traffic-data-for-specif... it's a bit fiddly, but with "typical lengths" of trains, and a time-table you can get a pretty good estimate going!

2.  For the Floor plan, it it's current state it doesn't estimate BRA-i nor BRA-s in Norway, it just naively gives you a area of the unit as if the walls are 0 thickness. In the Area metric - units, you can get a BRA-s breakdown that assumes BRA-s = 0.9xBRA. Now this can be customized and adjusted according to your needs (at this early sketch stage) and yea we should probably replace that standard to BRA-i now that this is implemented, I'll give that feedback to the team. The templates available are mostly there to inspire users to what can be done!

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks for the reply Marthe! I'd love to come see you guys in Oslo one day:)

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks for the reply Marthe! I'd love to come see you guys in Oslo one day:)

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks for some great feedback Jesper! 

I'll dive into the "native outdoor extension" asap. And I'll keep future extension releases on my radar!

I've had an okay workaround to get more accurate BRA-i values where I assign cores and corridor to a separate "Function" which in turn is excluded from the BRA-s Area metric. I can see how this is quite region specific, and perhaps not desirable in a global context. Just like my wish for automatic "Nordic" apartment-layouts:)

I’ve had a look at your new help-menu posts, and I still find it hard translating the local rail-traffic into ADT-values..

One last wish 😉

I’d also like the sun-analysis to be able to show a sun/shadow-render with area-metric for a specific time, and not just a time period. For example: how much sunlit area is there exactly 6 pm in the afternoon?

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks for some great feedback Jesper! 

I'll dive into the "native outdoor extension" asap. And I'll keep future extension releases on my radar!

I've had an okay workaround to get more accurate BRA-i values where I assign cores and corridor to a separate "Function" which in turn is excluded from the BRA-s Area metric. I can see how this is quite region specific, and perhaps not desirable in a global context. Just like my wish for automatic "Nordic" apartment-layouts:)

I’ve had a look at your new help-menu posts, and I still find it hard translating the local rail-traffic into ADT-values..

One last wish 😉

I’d also like the sun-analysis to be able to show a sun/shadow-render with area-metric for a specific time, and not just a time period. For example: how much sunlit area is there exactly 6 pm in the afternoon?

[jesper.staahl]

I'd love to learn more about your BRA-i workaround here, what works, what doesn't, maybe there is something for the product team here to learn about how to make this modular enough for your needs! If we can't make your automatic Nordic modules for you, at least I hope one day you'll be able to do it yourself!

so for local rail-traffic, and I am no noise consultant, I 've just looked at the timetable for the "busiest" day of a week, busiest because that's the most conservative (most noise) situation. so If the timetable tells me there will be 56 train passings, each way, that day, means my ADT = 56x2= 112 ADT right? As for rail lengths, if its metro those are easy to find, for passenger trains its a little more complicated.. 

Now what I do is that I quickly make myself a duplicate base, where I set the ADT to 224 (2x ADT!) just to learn if the difference is big or small. Depending on speed, distance, and terrain, the difference may be negligible or significant. If it's significant, I know that I need to know more about this noise source, I should keep finding quality sources of traffic data, maybe even reach out to my traffic or noise consultant for a quick sanity-check. If the difference is whatever, I feel more secure that the rail noise situation will be less of a factor for my design.  Either way, it de-risks my project before any experts have had to join me and look at it, which is good. What if the ADT jumps to 5x my realistic estimate? Does it matter? Easy enough to just check and play around with.

For area exposed to sun at a specific hour, you can limit your sun hours to settings for a specific date, a specific 1h timeslot (in my example 17:00-18:00), filter for ground only, change the filter to only show me areas the have 1h or more of sun, and look at the expanded area statistics on the right menu to get that answer. 

Or again, the Naviate Outdoor Area answers the question on sunlit outdoor area to the Norwegian market in even more detail. uses the Forma analysis, and presents it relevant to your market, can't recommend it enough!

[jesper.staahl]

I'd love to learn more about your BRA-i workaround here, what works, what doesn't, maybe there is something for the product team here to learn about how to make this modular enough for your needs! If we can't make your automatic Nordic modules for you, at least I hope one day you'll be able to do it yourself!

so for local rail-traffic, and I am no noise consultant, I 've just looked at the timetable for the "busiest" day of a week, busiest because that's the most conservative (most noise) situation. so If the timetable tells me there will be 56 train passings, each way, that day, means my ADT = 56x2= 112 ADT right? As for rail lengths, if its metro those are easy to find, for passenger trains its a little more complicated.. 

Now what I do is that I quickly make myself a duplicate base, where I set the ADT to 224 (2x ADT!) just to learn if the difference is big or small. Depending on speed, distance, and terrain, the difference may be negligible or significant. If it's significant, I know that I need to know more about this noise source, I should keep finding quality sources of traffic data, maybe even reach out to my traffic or noise consultant for a quick sanity-check. If the difference is whatever, I feel more secure that the rail noise situation will be less of a factor for my design.  Either way, it de-risks my project before any experts have had to join me and look at it, which is good. What if the ADT jumps to 5x my realistic estimate? Does it matter? Easy enough to just check and play around with.

For area exposed to sun at a specific hour, you can limit your sun hours to settings for a specific date, a specific 1h timeslot (in my example 17:00-18:00), filter for ground only, change the filter to only show me areas the have 1h or more of sun, and look at the expanded area statistics on the right menu to get that answer. 

Or again, the Naviate Outdoor Area answers the question on sunlit outdoor area to the Norwegian market in even more detail. uses the Forma analysis, and presents it relevant to your market, can't recommend it enough!

[jesper.staahl · Accepted solution]

..Actually I don't think the sun at specific hour answer I gave is entirely accurate Bjarni! I'm going to leave it up while I discuss with the analysis squad. Have a great weekend!

the Naviate Outdoor Area Analysis however does give you an answer for at 15:00 on March 21st

[jesper.staahl · Accepted solution]

..Actually I don't think the sun at specific hour answer I gave is entirely accurate Bjarni! I'm going to leave it up while I discuss with the analysis squad. Have a great weekend!

the Naviate Outdoor Area Analysis however does give you an answer for at 15:00 on March 21st

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks Jesper! The Outdoor Area-Extension really is a great tool! It helps with a lot of the issues I’ve been missing in Forma when it comes to developing residential-projects here in Norway – Thanks again!

It’s the passenger train traffic-values here in Norway that have been hard to decipher (Excel-sheets from Bane NOR). In projects where rail-noise is an issue we usually must consult an acoustician. For my most recent early stage design I’ve been satisfied with just entering traffic values that look correct visually. Also, there often there’s an old report we can compare the analysis with visually. This is often enough to see the effect of different design decisions early on. The details we leave for the consultant anyways.

[bjarni.thorgrimsson]

Thanks Jesper! The Outdoor Area-Extension really is a great tool! It helps with a lot of the issues I’ve been missing in Forma when it comes to developing residential-projects here in Norway – Thanks again!

It’s the passenger train traffic-values here in Norway that have been hard to decipher (Excel-sheets from Bane NOR). In projects where rail-noise is an issue we usually must consult an acoustician. For my most recent early stage design I’ve been satisfied with just entering traffic values that look correct visually. Also, there often there’s an old report we can compare the analysis with visually. This is often enough to see the effect of different design decisions early on. The details we leave for the consultant anyways.