Spacemaker
Analysis overview
Spacemaker’s analyses enable you to accurately test and understand your proposals during the early stages, planning in greater detail than ever before, especially when it comes to buildability, livability and compliance. They’re fast and easy to use, meaning you don’t need in-depth technical expertise to run an analysis.
On this page you’ll find an overview of the analyses available within Spacemaker, as well as links to any relevant documentation or articles. For more information, please visit our Help center*.
Discover our analyses
Select an option below to find out more
Area analysis | Building analysis | Daylight analysis (VSC) | Microclimate analysis | Noise analysis | Rapid Operational Energy analysis | Solar Panel analysis | Sun analysis | View analysis | Wind analysis
Area Analysis
Quickly calculates various area metrics that are relevant to your site. The metrics vary dependent on the location of the site to ensure appropriate terms and calculation methods are used. By adjusting the calculation parameters, you have significant control of the resulting values. More details can be found in the Area metrics section within the technical documentation.
Building analysis
Spacemaker provides a building analysis that quickly calculates various metrics related to the buildings on your site. This includes: number of buildings, average number of stories, total area of all facades, total volume, number of exterior corners, average building height, and maximum building height.
Daylight analysis (Vertical sky component)
Using the Daylight analysis in Spacemaker you will get insight regarding daylight performance on your site. Spacemaker have two analyses to assess daylight quality: Obstruction Angle and Vertical Sky Component.
More information
Obstruction Angle is a geometric measure for indicating daylight potential.
- BRE (Building Research Establishment) guidelines
- CIE overcast Sky for 21 September at 12:00pm, International Commission on Illumination
- OptiX™ Ray Tracing Engine by NVIDIA (technology)
- Academic paper: Daylight prediction based on the VSC - DF relation study from Lund University
Microclimate analysis
Microclimate analysis provides a way to quickly, easily, and accurately evaluate the thermal comfort of outdoor spaces. It combines our sun, wind, and daylight analyses with historic weather data to create a comprehensive microclimate map of your site.
More information
To represent this “feels-like” temperature, the analysis uses the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), which is the most commonly used thermal comfort metric and widely considered to be both an accurate and respected indicator. Weather data, which is obtained from the ERA5 dataset provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, includes information about radiation, cloud cover, and winds.
Relevant links
Noise analysis
Noise analysis is a powerful tool for decision makers to address problems related to environmental noise.
More information
This noise analysis was developed and tested with input from Sweco. The noise analysis in Spacemaker is developed based on the Common Noise Assessment Methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU). This method is developed by the European Commission. It was also based on a preliminary version of the ISO 17534-4 (ISO 17534-4). While still under development, the ISO 17534-4 standard contains test cases similarly to those in ISO 17534-3.
Rapid Operational Energy analysis
Rapid operational energy analysis predicts operational energy in real time, helping you design with energy efficiency in mind from day one.
More information
In the analysis you can modify a selection of key design factors for energy consumption – including geometry, window-to-wall ratio, and roof and wall construction types – and immediately see how those interrelated factors impact predicted energy use (kWh/m2/year).
The analysis uses machine learning, whereby a huge dataset of building models was first analyzed with a complex energy simulation engine for energy usage (InsightX Energy Analysis) against a variety of building factors. These results were used to train a machine learning model that accurately predicts energy use. The energy predictions are ±5% from the actual simulations.
Relevant links
Solar panel analysis
Solar panel analysis assesses the potential of a site for solar panel electricity generation, providing several outputs with just a few simple inputs. Our model has been validated against tools like PVWatts and PVGIS, while also taking the shading from existing, surrounding, and proposal buildings into account.
More information
The photovoltaic analysis uses our sun analysis as a foundation, calculating sun maps on a 1m x 1m grid for all on-site roofs for each hour of the year. We pull solar radiation data from the Copernicus database, scaling the direct solar radiation for the angle of incidence calculated using the user-inputted panel angle and hourly sun angle, as well as scaling the diffuse solar radiation using the Sandia Simple Sky Diffuse Model. The analysis has three outputs: kWh/m2/year, kWh/roof/year, and kW/roof.
Relevant links
Sun analysis
Spacemaker has two main types of direct sun analyses: analyses of sun hours on building facades, and analyses of sun hours on the ground. Users can set specific dates for sun hour for their studies. The analysis takes into account shading caused by buildings and/or terrain surrounding the site to assess the hours of sun a site receives. Read an introduction here*.
View analysis
In Spacemaker we provide two types of View analysis: View Distance and View to Area. The View Distance analysis measures the spaciousness around points on facades, giving an indication of how distant the view is. The View to Area analysis demonstrates whether an observer, located at the building facade, can see an area of interest (such as a landmark, or river).
Wind analysis
A powerful tool for early phase assessment of your site for various effects caused by wind. The Wind analysis was developed with consideration for the quality requirements in the London wind guidelines. These guidelines were chosen due to the high level of technical details relevant for early phase wind comfort assessment on urban sites, which agrees with relevant academic literature. To ensure reliability, the analysis has been benchmarked against several engineering consultancies as well as academic benchmarks.
More information
Spacemaker’s Wind Analysis leverages the following methods and sources:
- 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
- OpenFOAM
- Steady-state RANS
- k-Epsilon turbulence model
- Global Wind Atlas and ERA5 (for wind roses)
* Requires Spacemaker account
More information
Spacemaker’s Wind Analysis leverages the following methods and sources:
- 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
- OpenFOAM
- Steady-state RANS
- k-Epsilon turbulence model
- Global Wind Atlas and ERA5 (for wind roses)
