Some of you know me from around here – for years I’ve been sharing my journey in building tools for Rhino/GH and the messy reality of getting environmental analysis into real projects.
A bit of backstory – jifto was born at Henning Larsen out of frustration that only our computational design team could run sustainability assessments. We wanted to give design teams something that fit seamlessly into their pipeline: intuitive, instant, and integrated.
I’ll let you be the judge of how well we delivered on that
It covers:
site import,
sun,
wind,
microclimate,
stormwater,
earthworks
biodiversity
– tasks you’d normally use multiple specialist packages to complete.
Yes, it’s a commercial plugin and there are paid plans. But there’s also a forever-free tier – 30 minutes a day.
So go ahead – be the judge. Take it for a spin on your projects, and tell me where it breaks. This forum has shaped how I think for years, and I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback.
Coming from Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and working a lot on building quick in-house tools to enable analysis and design to be done in tandem, I’m usually really wary of “blackbox” like tools based on LLMs that are out there.
But just judging on the videos, this looks quite exposed and discernible. Will find sometime to take it for a spin!
Also curious how the Biodiversity analysis will be tackled, I tend to speak a lot with ecologist and environmental specialist co-workers about the subject and it always tends to be a bit of a controversial topic when it comes down to the analysis and quantification methodology. Will it be based off the global BHI framework? Or we’ll be able to choose from more local frameworks (UKHAB in the UK, for example)?
I’m a civil engineer by training and worked for many years as a landscape architect on many project so can definitely relate to at least some of the challenges our industry is facing.
To be clear - all analysis run by jifto are 100% physics-based. There are no ML-based approximations. The LLM assistant is there to provide high-level guidance, summarize the results, and allow users to interact with the plugin. But it is never involved in generating any results.
You can read more about the data sources we use and underlying methodology for jifto here:
Regarding biodiversity - the module currently supports three different metrics with varying geographical coverage. The BNG metric mandatory in the UK is part of it. Biodiversity is also the only module which lives outside of Rhino and you can take it for a spin here without any limitations:
It will soon be integrated into the Rhino plugin too.
I like that you call it a ‘conclusion’ – for us it’s really just the beginning
The roadmap keeps growing, with ideas mapped out for at least the next 5 years. To give you a taste, right now we’re working on better ways to visualize wind flow:
I’ve had people ask me about these kinds of analysis tools before, but many of them were a nightmare to install, difficult to use, and hard to test.
To be honest, I never truly succeeded with any of them (maybe because they don’t even let you test them properly without paying…).
But this tool is incredibly fast and easy to use! I’m definitely going to recommend it to others. It feels like a breath of fresh air after being stuck for so long. Truly amazing job!
Thank @Jean-Go!
jifto was born out of two opposing emotions - love for architecture and frustration with the current tools at hand. I’m happy to hear that it solves some of your pains!
I’ve had people ask me about these kinds of analysis tools before, but many of them were a nightmare to install, difficult to use, and hard to test.
To be honest, I never truly succeeded with any of them (maybe because they don’t even let you test them properly without paying…).
But this tool is incredibly fast and easy to use! I’m definitely going to recommend it to others. It feels like a breath of fresh air after being stuck for so long. Truly amazing job!
Even though it probably wasn’t designed for this purpose, I tried using it for a virtual car wind tunnel test, and the results turned out much better than expected! If I test it a bit further, I think this tool could be used for a wide variety of unexpected applications.
For such small objects, I’d recommend increasing resolution in the advanced settings. It will give you much better quality.
The coming update will also bring a few quality-of-life-improvements to the wind simulation module and I’m looking forward to seeing what you are going to use it for.
@mrhe I saw your release video outside this post and meant to write you but I’ll just say here, it’s great to see this come together and there’s so many great things going on in this!
I think my favorite portion outside the real-time and very fluid looking simulation results is the ability to easily drag and drop the “clipping volumes” into the scene to just simulate in the area you care about.
Great stuff and I’m looking forward to seeing the continued development and actually applying to my next projects!
Thank you for sharing!
EDIT:
is the site context editable after the loading it? Can you reduce the context or add more context without needing to start from scratch?
yes! Site context is brought in as regular Rhino meshes. You can chose to work in a georeferenced file with an arbitrary coordinate system, or bring everything to local origin. Users can chose to mix and match imported content with local sources:
You can always skip the automated import and work with geometry created manually in or outside of Rhino. jifto will digest any geometry type Rhino supports (surfaces, extrusions, meshes, subds, etc.).
We will eventually create a Mac version. Currently jifto requires an Nvidia GPU and leverages a lot of custom OpenGL for both the UI and the display pipeline. First, we will transition to DirecX for Rhino 9, and then tackle Metal on OSX.
Oh that’s awesome to know and have those toggles! I actually was meaning can you choose to bring in a larger size of automated context or reduce the amount of automated context imported after the initial context import but I love what you outlined in your reply here, that’s wonderful!
If you need larger areas, you would simply repeat the process at an offset from the initial point. But there would be some overlapping geometry which you’d have to trim/deduplicate manually.
@dusancv just published a super cool tutorial on his HowToRhino YouTube channel:
And there is also a 1-hour long Food4Rhino webinar where @Guillermo_Varela allowed me to go into more detail about the origina story behing jifto, its functionality, and plans for the future:
With much of Europe under another heat wave, this release lands on a timely question: how will a site feel like, now and as summers keep getting hotter? You can now test any design against different climate scenarios – historical weather and future climate projections.
Analyzing the wind is now easier than ever, with much finer control over your flowlines. Place them exactly where you want and trace a cooling breeze through a courtyard or along a facade to see where it reaches, and where it doesn’t.
Cooling matters indoors too. Estimate how much sun a building receives across the whole summer and what that means for AC demand.
