My task was to create custom nodes to measure and report two new evaluation metrics for the building form test cases created in Module 5.
The evaluation metrics that I chose to measure are 1: Projected Construction Cost and 2: Inner Directness of a View
- To measure the projected construction cost, I first had to set up the construction costs per SF and their values via linear interpolation. According to the design brief, construction costs grew linearly from $700/sf at the ground level to $1500/sf at a height of 750’ above the ground.
Next, I created a list of the mass floor areas by floor. Then, I calculated the projected cost for each floor by multiplying construction costs by mass floor areas.
Following that, I removed any null values in the projected cost calculations and summed up all the values for the remaining valid floors.
The above was merged into a custom node which reported the final construction cost of the building.
- Second, I wanted to evaluate the views in my building towards another building outside. I assumed that users would not be right at the edge of a building, but at a chosen setback (similar to having a balcony/ledge area) of 10ft.
To do so, I created a setback building form from the original base radius reduced by 10ft. Next, I set up the inputs and selected the wall surfaces.
Following that, I created panel normals for each of the wall surfaces and the vector from the origin to the other building. I calculated the dot product between these two vectors to obtain the strength of directness of view. This was the output reported.
The above was merged into a custom node which reported the directness of the view.
Finally, I modified the custom node created in Module 5 for evaluating one input parameter to output the Construction Cost by Floor Area and Directness of View.
The final results obtained are:
