wow, this looks promising. i can empathize with the frustration at being the computational team who has to do these simulations (which often lag behind the design process).
it looks like many of the referenced standards are European standards. are there plans to implement standards from North America, ie LEED?
comfort depends on surface temperatures as well as wind speed, sun exposure, ambient air temps. how do you account for the emissivity of different materials, and can we import our own materials?
The underlying calculation methods are physics based and thus location agnostic. We are gradually adding support for easier presentation of results to better support local regulations or certification schemes. Which specific aspects of LEED would you like jifto to support?
The current version of the thermal comfort engine already takes into account ambient temperature, humidity, MRT, direct solar exposure and wind speed. MRT currently assumes a single material applied to all objects in the scene, but a comprehensive material library is coming in 2 weeks from now. You will then be able to create custom materials with adjustable parameters.
oof, i’m not actively calculating LEED certification, so i can’t say which area of LEED would be most suited to this type of tool. but it’s a significant certification scheme in NA.
i appreciate the results panel showing standard-agnostic results so it’s easier to understand what’s happening. can’t wait to see the material library. coincidentally, we are looking for a wind-simulation/microclimate tool for our office, and this one seems promising
We now have a live-Grasshopper connector to stay in the design flow without having to bake anything. You can create live analysis and context objects for all our simulation modules directly in GH.
We’ve added a new module to analyze architectural views. It helps answer the question what someone standing in a space can actually see.
You can also publish all analysis results directly to a Miro board shared with your team or clients.
And for the ones who are new to jifto, we’ve added more ways to get you up to speed fast:
Now, you can run wind studies on district and city-wide projects on a regular laptop. We made the simulation adaptive – it preserves detail near buildings and terrain, while being coarser in areas high above ground. The result? Up to 5x faster wind studies with the same accuracy. Turn it on with the Grid setting in the Wind tab.
Tree coverage improved just as much. Trees now come with every site import, anywhere in the world – no longer only where someone had mapped them by hand. And instead of a default guess, each tree arrives at the height and crown width measured from satellite imagery.
We also made sure that on larger projects, with thousands of buildings and trees, viewport navigation stays smooth – even while analyses are running.
Hi, Thanks for sharing this great work. I’ve successfully installed the plugin and quickly tested some of it’s features in the 30 minute free trial. I’m a designer in the Netherlands specialized in 3D design for architects, urban planners and also active in large scale GIS analysis projects with 8 years of experience in Grasshopper as well.
I was wondering if you would like any feedback on the plugin from me as a user specialized in projects located in the Netherlands. If so I would love to help out. Cheers! Robbie
Hi, Thanks for sharing this great work. I’ve successfully installed the plugin and quickly tested some of it’s features in the 30 minute free trial. I’m a designer in the Netherlands specialized in 3D design for architects, urban planners and also active in large scale GIS analysis with 8 years of experience in Grasshopper as well.
I was wondering if you would like any feedback on the plugin from me as a user specialized in projects in the Netherlands. If so I would love to help out. Cheers! Robbie
Hey Robbie,
definitely, I’m looking forward to all feedback! And just a heads up, the trial gives you free access 30 minutes per day and the daily limit will reset after 24 hours.
Nice, thanks for the quick reply.
So first thing I’ve not been able to figure out is to how to access the account settings.
Studio management where I’m currently operational at has approved and payed for the monthly license but there’s no way to change the email accounts or if the monthly license is auto renewed or not. Also we want to access billing and personal information in the account settings. Cannot find any link to that, the assistant is also not helpful and says to directly contact Jifto support so here I am
Another question is if it is possible to change the appearance of the Jifto Trees. like adding transparency without losing it’s shadowcasting properties.
When you subscribed, you received a confirmation email from our payment provider - creem. There is a link to manage your account including billing information, cancellations, etc. Please send me a PM if you want me to set up license forwarding to another email address than the one you used for the payment.
We’ve heard from a few users that finding account management is a bit confusing and will simplify this in the upcoming update.
As for the trees - good idea to add a transparency parameter. This will also be part of a future update.
That’s awesome, again thanks for the replies.
For now I’ve scripted my own tree generator so that I can disable the “preview” mode in Jifto, keep the sun analysis mesh for example and crank up the transparency of the trees so that the analysis is fully readable from an ISO point of view.
Sadly I could not adjust the transparency of the standard Jifto tree assets from the layer settings for some reason so I had to create a tree mesh generator for myself to get somewhat of a similar result that is able to switch between winter and summer modes. I’m really glad the analysis is visible in the shaded Rhino viewport so that I am able to remove the cartoony geometry outlines as well. Since the Jifto preview has all “relevant” geometry outlined it kinda determines the looks of any ISO imagery that is derived from the preview.
Some preview settings that is able to switch these appearance features on or off would also be very nice and give the exported visuals a lot more freedom.
Currently the analysis preview meshes are not visible when I switch to the layers panel or object properties panel. It would also be nice to be able to switch layers on and off while keeping the preview meshes visible to keep track of these changes.
EDIT, A bug I ran into is that when I remove custom analysis objects from the jifto wind analysis panel it also removes the original referenced objects from Rhino.
EDIT #2, What would be really nice in terms of transparency is to be able to toggle or adjust the visibility / transparency of all “context” geometry in one go. This way the “analysis” geometry can easily be isolated and exported for visual content
Thanks for the detailed feedback! It would be helpful if you shared a few screenshots of what you are trying to achieve. We can definitely include more elaborate styling controls of trees and possibly allow users to select their custom meshes to make the final looks more personal.
Nice. I could provide you with some screenshots of what I’ve achieved so far and what we’re trying to achieve as soon as I have some spare moments during my work hours XD. One thing that makes things a bit complicated is that hiding a layer will also exclude that geometry from the jifto analysis. So now I’m currently changing the layer properties to full transparency and changing the display options to no outlines/ surface edges. This way I can visualize the relevant geometry analysis behind / underneath the trees for instance.
Let’s say I just need an ISO visual of the sunlight exposure on my buildings but not with the trees blocking the view. With the Jifto tree previews this was actually impossible since I could not override the visual style of the Jifto geometry so I’ve created a tree generator from scratch on a separate Rhino layer, added them to the analysis context geometry and then made it invisible via the display settings.
As I’m explaining this it might also be a possibility to change the jifto tree display properties by setobjectdisplaymode command. But otherwise it would be nice to have some control over these factors.
What also was a small but annoying bug just like with the wind analysis is when I remove custom analysis objects from the list they also get removed as geometry from Rhino. XD Makes life just a little bit harder. Either way first impressions / actual project with Jifto analysis and it’s very very promising.
