Hi,
Has anyone used Autodesk Insight before? From the intro video of Insight, it’s doing the same thing as Pollination - on creating energy model from revit model. What’s the problem of Insight, if any? How does Pollination compare to Insight?
Hi @xavierzhou,
Thank you for posting your question here.
Disclaimer: I’m obviously biased, and I have not used Autodesk Insight for any projects. I have tested it years ago once while I was part of the team who were developing the Dynamo package for Green Building Studio (GBS) integration.
Here is the list of differences that I’m aware of. Hopefully, others will add more items and correct me if I’m wrong.
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BIM → BEM: Insight relies on Revit’s built-in methods for extracting analytical geometry from Revit. From my experience, trying to get a clean gbXML from Revit, it never works! Try to download the geometry that is uploaded to Insight, and you will see for yourself. Pollination is built to ensure it gives you all you need to export a clean and reliable analytical model. See the testimonials here.
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Design Philosophy: Insight is a black box. It is designed to be easy to use. The offering of what can be done is limited and it is not designed to be customizable. It also only works with Autodesk products. Pollination is open. It is designed as an open ecosystem. You can pick and choose based on your needs. You can export the model and continue working in a different software or import models that are created in other platforms. You can read more here: Pollination Blog: Principles of Pollination
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Existing Features: As is, Pollination offers more than energy, daylight and radiation studies. You can run indoor and outdoor comfort studies, glare and more. You can see the recipes here.
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Extending Features/Customizability: You can extend Pollination by adding new recipes or apps or editing the existing ones. Such concepts don’t exist in Autodesk Insight.
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Model Precision/Life Cycle: The details that can be put in Insight models seems to be very limited. My understanding is that it is meant to only be used for early-stage design studies. Pollination is designed to be used during all the different stages of the design process.
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Cloud lock-in: Insight only offers cloud-based simulation. That means you are locked-in their cloud service. Pollination offers a hybrid solution. You can run all your studies locally. Running the simulations on the cloud is optional.
I can go on, but I stop myself here! Let’s see what others have to share. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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