Unlock Better Building Design with Enscape Impact: A Deep Dive into the 2025 Roadmap

Hey there, architects and designers! Are you ready to take your building designs to the next level? We're diving into Enscape Impact, a tool that's set to revolutionize how you approach building performance analysis. Forget just creating visually stunning buildings; let's create sustainable and highly efficient ones, too!

What is Enscape Impact?

So, what exactly is Enscape Impact? It's an innovative building performance analysis tool that gives you key insights into how your building will perform long before it's even built. We're not just talking about projects aiming for certification; we're talking about every building.

Think about it: buildings are responsible for a huge chunk of global carbon emissions. Yet, most buildings don't undergo thorough performance analysis. Enscape Impact changes that. It allows you to integrate performance analysis seamlessly into your workflow, giving you the power to make informed decisions early on. It's all about creating a better environment through sustainable design.

In partnership with IES, a renowned company in the industry, Enscape Impact delivers fast, reliable results. You don't need to wait for hours to see how your design stacks up. Plus, you can catch potential issues before they become costly headaches.

Here's the core idea: Enscape Impact empowers architects like you with the insights you need, right when you need them. This gives you a competitive edge, allowing you to showcase the sustainability of your designs with confidence. And the best part? You don't need to be an expert to use it!

Faster Iterations = Better Design. With Enscape Impact, you can present more design options, each backed by solid data. This means you can win more projects and create buildings that are both beautiful and sustainable. 

Live Demo Highlights: Revit Integration

Let's jump into how Enscape Impact works with Revit. The great news is, Enscape Impact plays well with all the host applications that Enscape supports! That includes:

• Revit
• Vectorworks
• Rhino
• SketchUp
• ArchiCAD

Keep in mind it's currently available for Windows machines only.

During the demo, they walked us through setting up a project in Revit. Here are some key takeaways:

• New UI Design: The interface is clean and intuitive, making it easy to get started.
• Location Selection: Location is key because it informs the climate data used for the analysis. The tool automatically detects the location from your host application, but you can easily adjust it manually.
• Building Type Selection: This is where the magic happens! IES has developed default templates based on ASHRAE standards for different building types. Currently, "Office" is available, with more on the way!
• Building Year: This ensures the correct ASHRAE standards are applied to your analysis.
• Renovation Year (Optional): Perfect for renovation projects, allowing you to analyze the energy needs of existing buildings.

Once you've entered this information, Enscape Impact gets to work. The demo showed results appearing in under a minute!

A Quick Tip: If you're using custom assets in your model, hide those layers in a specific view to ensure accurate analysis.

What kind of insights can you expect?

• Peak Load: Divided into heating and cooling, helping you understand the demands based on your location's climate.
• Total Operational Carbon Emissions: Based on the building's energy requirements for its location.
• Energy Use Intensity (EUI): Compared to similar buildings in similar climates, giving you a benchmark for your design's performance. A low EUI is a great sign!
• EUI Breakdown: A detailed look at energy consumption for cooling, hot water, lighting, heating, and equipment.

The Performance Map is another fantastic feature, providing room-based insights. Want to know which rooms have the highest heating peak loads? The performance map will show you! You can easily change parameters and trigger re-analysis to explore different design variants.

Enscape Impact: 2025 Roadmap

What does the future hold for Enscape Impact? Here's a sneak peek at the 2025 roadmap:

• UI Refinement: An even better onboarding process and clearer explanations of dashboard results.
• Additional Building Types: Expanding beyond "Office" to include:
  • Hospitality
  • Sports
  • Industrial
• Thermal Comfort Analysis (Coming Soon!): This will allow you to explore how occupants will feel in different spaces and take design measures to improve their comfort.
• Space Types and Mixed Building Types: Assign building types to specific spaces for a more accurate energy model. Imagine assigning "Garage" (unconditioned) to the garage space and "Office" (conditioned) to the office spaces.
• Section Tool: Explore performance maps floor-by-floor without creating sections in your host application.
• Advanced Project Settings (Later This Year): Customize default templates and gain control over building construction components, like facade modification and R-value adjustments. You'll also be able to customize occupancy patterns.
• Daylight Analysis: This will improve thermal comfort analysis by accounting for site and building shading elements.
• Data Exports: A highly requested feature that will allow you to track analysis, manage design variants, and integrate your workflow with sustainability departments and engineers.
• AI Integration: Chaos acquired a new AI company and they are planning to add AI into their portfolio of products.

How You Can Benefit From Using Enscape Impact

Let's talk about how Enscape Impact can transform your design process. Imagine being able to:

• Easily update building orientation and see the impact on energy analysis in real-time.
• Quickly add more glazing as a design variant and compare the results.
• Save different variants in separate projects or views for easy comparison.

Enscape Impact empowers you to make informed decisions every step of the way. You can confidently compare design options and provide your clients with clear expectations about the impact of their choices.

Take Action Now!

Ready to experience the power of Enscape Impact for yourself? Try it out with a free trial! We'd love to hear your feedback and feature requests.

Have questions? Reach out to the sales team, we're happy to help!

Let's build a more sustainable future, one design at a time!