Mstn's Hypermodeling is great at leveraging 2d drawings in a 3d design environment.
Mstn has also got some great visualisation tools like the solar calculator and shadow generator that gives the designer quick usable feedback in the 3d design envionment. The gradient Display Style is the other particularly useful tool.
It would be great to see more tools that leverage simulation calculation tools in 2d cuts in the 3d model.
1. One great example of this is quick thermal bridge / dew point calculations thru 2d cuts through the building fabric. Keeping things 2d keeps the feedback levels up. It would be great to be able to leverage AecoSim Energy Simulator's algo's in AecoSim Building Designer. I know so many architects who can't be bothered or can't do the math. In any case, corners etc are also pretty difficult to calculate by hand.
2. Another example would be pedestrian movement: I think this will be a pretty big eye opener for architects, and will increasingly play a big role in how large buildings are designed and evaluated. Already standard practice in the transportation, sports, retail building types, and for urban realm designs. Pedflow is like wind or hydraulic flows...
3. Lighting: spacing of light fittings. Buidlings tend to have minimum lux level requirements on the floor plane. Select a floor plane the plane gets 'painted' by the luminaires overhead; as well as daylighting?
4. 2d room air flows? Cut through a room using the DV tool, and add 2d air flow 'display style'..... and the air movement speeds and/or temperature would be 'painted' on the 2d section plane.
5. Another thing architects are pretty bad at is sizing gutters etc for roofs. Select the roof planes+ gutters, identify the outlet loacations (already part of AecoSim's multi-dsiplinary database, right?) Maybe the ped modeling engine can be hacked to simulate the hydraulic flow and paint those bits of the gutter that are overflowing due to lack of freeboard. Could use this for pavement design as well. Permeable paving? How permeable? where? If I increase permeability here can I avoid puddling there?
6. What about acoustics? How much absoption class A,B,C area would you need to maintain your RASTI or reverberation times etc? Or, If you have a wall with an overall Rw requirement, but the wall has doors, windows, duct penetrations etc, you would need to manually tot up the areas and weight them accordingly to arrive at an average. No one bothers as it is too tedious. It would be great to be able to pick a display style that would 'paint' the wall to show Rw ratings of each element with a cumulative rating for the whole wall. After all, all that Rw rating info is already in the DGS or F+P system, right? Just needs extracting and multiplication with their respective areas (also in the DGS / F+P system).
The little things...