Forma area restriction.

[juri.pelkonen]

We are currently using forma on several area development projects, and we repeatedly run into the problem of area size restrictions built into Forma.

This is mostly due to Finland being a  sparsely populated country, which leads to area development projects being of considerable size (in land area that is, other metrics, not so much 😁). IIRC Forma only supports about a mile x mile size areas, and for large portion of our projects this simply is not enough.

Is there a workaround for this?

[Sylvia.Anggraeni · Accepted solution]

I had same problem last year, so this is my workaround, hope it helps:

1. Exporting Area Chunks into Revit: Once in Revit, you can combine and edit these chunks to create a larger, cohesive area that meets your project’s needs.

2. Renaming Topography Satellite Map Images: Another useful tip is to rename the topography satellite map images. This helps avoid any conflicts or overwriting issues, as these files often have the same default name.

3. Minus Point: is that it doesn’t sync back to Forma because the file changed. This only works if you need the existing data and topography to continue working in Revit, but not for analysis in Forma or maybe make separated analysis for each region in Forma.

[kasper.herlov]

Thanks for sharing this workaround Sylvia! 
For the record, we are aware that some customers struggle with the size limit. The reason we have it is to ensure performance, but we are periodically reviewing our options to make it larger. I'd love to get a sense of the kind of projects you are looking to enable. Could you shoot me a message here on the forum and then we will take it from there? 🤞

[gavinrargo]

We're running into this in our office as well.
Many of our projects are on more rural and remote areas where the sites can be several miles of area of very low density.   While stitching a few together in Revit like Silvia mentioned is possible (we've been doing similar), our planning team specifically would love to use Forma's massing tools themselves for the early conceptual layouts, but they can't present a unified design scheme broken out into 4+ different Forma projects.

One current project is 2,100 acres, with around 30 existing buildings on the site, and the team is looking at the planning and site design between them, and currently have tried using 4 projects to cover the whole area (they switched to Rhino shortly after for an "easier" workflow).

[kasper.herlov]

This is very useful info @gavinrargo , thanks for sharing. Such rural areas would probably (<insert many disclaimers not knowing the specifics>) have no problems with performance. On that use case, I wonder, how would you find it if everything stayed the same apart from the area size itself?
Like, say the radius limit for noise and wind analysis, which is currently 350m. 

[gavinrargo]

For what we want the tool to do it'd work perfect.  We're not usually doing wholistic site studies with those tools (more localized to buildings), but their shared context is important.  We work on lots of project scales, so that flexibility is nice.  Being able to tie it to level of detail instead of just site size would be awesome (not sure how that could be done though).  Joking entirely, but it's the difference between a New York mile and a Texas mile.

Another example of how we've been using / testing is a residential project in rural Colorado, USA.   The overall site is again about 2 sq mi, but with about 4 buildings total on the site.  The team was trying to study several massing options and clusterings on the site (and the associated wind breaks and shade implications) at a massing block level, but eventually went with another tool since they couldn't show the whole client site (Rhino with Tally).

[kasper.herlov]

Thanks for the added detail. I think the NYC-Texas mile is a perfectly valid framing. Simplistic of course, but I do think it is a useful frame when discussing what it takes to enable this technically speaking, so I will steal that in my talks with the team 🙂 

Curious, what project size/area are you dreaming of? What would suit your own needs and those of your planning team?

[gavinrargo]

Poked around a few of the projects our planning team were working on, and especially for some of our more spread-out hospitality projects, something like 4mi x 4mi would be amazing, thought that would certainly be an outlier.  A 4sq mi limit would cover many of our projects though, provided we could accommodate odd shaped sites.  
Similar to many of our models using Twinmotion or Unreal, it's like we almost want to tie it to LOD or polycount in the "file" rather than real world scale somehow.

[kasper.herlov]

The lod/poly reference makes total sense. It's not a premise we are built on though, but it might be where things should end up in order to cover the range of projects architects work on and to obtain good performance across these types. 

Noting in my feedback base that 4x4 mi as well as freeform(-ish) 4sq mi are some useful pointers for sizes to aim for 🙂 

[juri_pelkonenE4XP5]

Hi  @kasper.herlov , sorry for my absence from this discussion! I cannot share exact details of the projects, but as a general rule of thumb a previously suggested 4x4 mile area would be superb. Enabling that, with caveats for example, would give our large scale residential and hospitality projects greatly enhanced possibilities to develop and evaluate them from properly wide "perspective" so to say. The projects themselves rarely are larger that 2 by 2 miles, which of course is still larger than Forma currently supports.

As for the workarounds: we definitely do not want to bounce projects back and forth between different sw. That instantly disrupts the project flow.

[kasper.herlov]

Sure I understand Juri. I am just trying to get some sense of what size increments resonate or not. Thanks for sharing your perspectives. I will bring it with me to the work 🙂 

[csimpsonmunro]

this too is a problem we come across and are having to stitch together just as you say

[sandra_petkuteHNRTB]

Hi @kasper.herlov , I just wanted to piggyback on this comment thread to say that at Arcadis, we have a number of teams who are struggling with site size limits, too, particularly for planning projects in Canada, the US, and the Middle East. I just wanted to highlight that there is an industry need to strongly consider larger site options. 

[juri_pelkonenE4XP5]

Just an idea: If performance is an issue, would it be possible to allow a larger "surrounding area" with a smaller editable frame inside it. Many of our projects would benefit from this, as the actual project area is smaller than the surrounds, that would still be helpful to "drag along" to provide context for the design.

[nelsonbRGDYE]

I just started learning Forma with a site we are actually working on and we would need to analyze an area of 3 x 3 miles (9 Sq Mi), but we cannot change the area map limits. That is not acceptable.

[nelsonbRGDYE]

What about wind analysis? We, in the company I work for, design Solid Waste Management Facilities, which are huge sites, and we need to analyze how the odors carried out by winds would affect surrounding communities, including but not limited to residential, commercial, hospitality and industrial areas 

[nelsonbRGDYE]

Solid Waste Management Facilities, for instance. But a better idea would be to allow us (users) to modify the area map limits as we need up to 4 x 4 miles for example.

[johancruffy144]

Wah, bener banget! Batasan ukuran area di Forma memang kadang bikin ribet, apalagi buat proyek besar. Semoga aja ke depannya bisa ditingkatkan. Aku juga lagi suka coba-coba alat lain buat bantu kerjaan, termasuk yang seru kayak cek tanggal jadian.