The VI-Suite: a set of environmental analysis tools with geospatial data applications

Ryan Southall,Filip Biljecki

doi:10.1186/s40965-017-0036-1

Abstract

BackgroundThe VI-Suite is a free and open-source addon for the 3D content creation application Blender, developed primarily as a tool for the contextual and performative analysis of buildings. Its functionality has grown from simple, static lighting analysis to fully parametric lighting, shadowing, and building energy analyses. It adopts a flexible, mesh geometry based approach to the specification of calculation points and this has made it suitable for certain types of 3D geospatial analyses and data visualisation.ResultsAs this is the first academic paper to discuss the VI-Suite, a history of its development is presented along with a review of its capabilities of relevance to geospatial analysis. As the VI-Suite combines the functionality of 3D design software with performance simulation, some of the benefits of this combination are discussed including aspects that make it suitable for the processing and analysis of potentially large geospatial datasets. Example use cases with a 3D city model of the Hague are used to demonstrate some of the geospatial workflows possible and some of the result visualisation options.ConclusionsThe free and open-source nature of the VI-Suite, combined with the use of Blender mesh geometry to define calculation points, has encouraged usage scenarios not originally intended by the authors, for example large scale urban shadow and radiation analyses. The flexibility inherent in this mesh based approach enables the analysis of large geospatial datasets by giving the user refined control over the distribution of calculation points within the model. The integration of GIS analysis into a digital design package such as Blender offers advanced geometry/material editing and specification, provides tools such as ray casting and BVH tree generation to speed up the simulation of large datasets, and enhanced visualisation of GIS simulation data including animated city fly-throughs and high quality image production. The VI-Suite is part of a completely open-source tool chain and contributions from the community are welcome to further enhance its current geospatial data capabilities.

Highlights

This paper presents for the first time the VI-Suite, a free and open-source integrated set of building environmental performance simulation tools that encompasses functionality suitable for geospatial analysis
Many of these capabilities can be found in other software packages the free, multi-platform and open-source nature of the VI-Suite, and all the applications it relies on including Blender, Radiance, EnergyPlus and Python, makes the VI-Suite unique and available to anyone interested in built-environment performance with
Of the three geospatially relevant analyses that the VI-Suite can conduct: shadow mapping, sky view factor mapping and irradiance mapping the focus here is on solar irradiance analysis of buildings and ground shadow analysis

Summary

Results

As this is the first academic paper to discuss the VI-Suite, a history of its development is presented along with a review of its capabilities of relevance to geospatial analysis. As the VI-Suite combines the functionality of 3D design software with performance simulation, some of the benefits of this combination are discussed including aspects that make it suitable for the processing and analysis of potentially large geospatial datasets. Example use cases with a 3D city model of the Hague are used to demonstrate some of the geospatial workflows possible and some of the result visualisation options

Conclusions

Introduction

Background

Results and discussion