MORE ON SUN PATHS AND SHADING

At this point I've spend a great deal of time familiarizing myself with Ecotect. I've gone through a plethora of tutorials, some dealing with my initial concentration on shadows and daylighting and others not. Not only have I developed a good understanding of the Ecotect program, but I have also been able to develop a new design process for myself. With my beginners level of knowledge in Ecotect I will readily be able to use these tools to quickly test initial designs and concepts as I go along. This is a means to a better, more sustainable, and more user friendly final product. 


After I ran several tests on my large urban model, I opened and imported a scaled mass model of the building I designed for a particular parcel on this site this past semester. I ran through the same checklist of tasks, changing first my longitude, latitude and time zone. I continued to once again assign solar reflectors, display shadows, including shadows from and on selected objects, display a sun path and a diagram of shadow ranges. This went about three times faster as it was my second or third time around. In addition I tried and accomplished (some with more difficulty than others!) the following with this model: Attaining prevailing winds and climate data, finding a solar envelope, assigning materials and editing settings on the Visualisations Panel. This last exploration was much more useful than I expected it would be. Most of this the selections and changes on this deal with personal preferences, but I still found them useful. I did have several problems calculating and creating a solar envelope, though through a long series of trials and errors arrived at one that I am highly skeptical of. On the other hand, I do not know much about this topic, so my skepticism may come from my lack of familiarity with solar envelopes and other thermal calculations. 


The following two images show daily and annual sun path diagram accompanying the model. Both images are taken at noon on the first of the month. The first image is in April, the second in September.

The diagrams and data produced by the "prevailing winds and climate data" analysis looked like the following: 

The colors in the graphs I were able to produce in my several tries all varied significantly form that in the example that I followed, but I believe this has to do with the drastic difference in climate and location, as well as building type. While I am examining a 400 foot mixed use building, the guide I followed was doing his analysis on a single level home in Australia. Therefore it makes much more sense that I will have greater winds. For those who are unfamiliar with this diagram, it essentially shows the frequency and velocity of winds in a given direction during a specified period. I chose to set my period to the Spring season, though you can look at specific periods of any given day or at a whole year.