This week I’ve been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo.
Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the “proposal” being developed. For the Hackathon I’d hardcoded the size of the buildings – the number of floors and the heights of each floor – but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it’s possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data: the elevations of each floor, the number of floors and even the polygons representing the each floor’s outline.
I’d originally used VASA to calculate sample points for the building – that we could use to approximate window locations – but I found that using the polygons for each floor would allow us to get regularly spaced windows and more easily determine which side we would be looking out from. (I…