TestFit Release - 5.1 - 3D Terrain & Soil Data

3D Terrain

Here’s a feature you’ve been waiting for! You can now visualize buildings on 3D terrain anywhere in the world, offering a more realistic view of how designs interact with actual topography in the real world. The 3D view reacts in real-time, giving you instantaneous feedback as you adjust buildings or drives. Plus, cut and fill calculations will automatically update with every change, ensuring your design is always accurate and optimized for the terrain.

Soil Data

For Data Maps, we've added the USA Soils Map from the SSURGO dataset. This layer provides detailed soil information including:

• Soil type
• Water table depth
• Bedrock depth
• Slope gradient

With these combined tools, you can ensure your projects are buildable and mitigate construction risks early on.

Improved Townhouse Circulation

The new feature enhances townhouse drive circulation by introducing sub-regions specifically designed for irregularly shaped sites. It also offers improved manual mode adjustments and better connectivity between smaller site areas, resulting in more efficient layouts and optimized density.

Tabulation Update: Building Coverage and Impervious Coverage

We’ve updated our Site Coverage metric into two distinct categories: 

• Building Coverage
• Impervious Coverage

Under the Tabulation tab, you can now quickly distinguish between these coverages for more accurate and detailed site analysis.

Data Center with Generative Design

With the addition of Data Center from our last release, you can now generate layouts based on the estimated energy available on the site. This means that you will be able to input a maximum and minimum megawatt (MW) to a site and only options that are within that limit will be generated.

Generative Design Subfiltering

In this release, we’ve also increased the customization capabilities of TestFit Generative Design. By introducing filters and subfilters, we’ve allowed you to further ensure that the solves we generate always fit the goals of your project. You can now optimize your solve output even more by including whether or not to solve for specific building types.

Improved Performance for Generative Design

If you don’t have the newest, fastest computers, we’ve improved the performance of Generative Design to make multi-tasking smoother and easier.

TestFit Accelerator

Access our learning portal from both the welcome screen and the help menu. Use TestFit Accelerator to take a deep dive into new features, refresh your skills, and track your progress to quickly level up your skills in TestFit.

New Onboarding Flow

New to TestFit or want to invite more users to your organization? We’ve improved our onboarding and installation processes to make it easier to get started with TestFit.

Details:

• Urban Planner: Users must now create an account to access the product.
• TestFit Accelerator: Access our learning portal from the welcome screen and help menu to uplevel your TestFit skills.
• Snap scale for drive aisle: Use the new snap scale for drive aisle spines, so you can easily place drive aisles near each other manually.
• Cut and fill: Get cut and fill calculations for free shape spaces.
• Undo/Redo: Perform undo and redo on Windows with your side mouse buttons, matching back and forward in browser-style navigation.
• Site boundary: Drag site boundary edges as a line instead of point by point to save time on customization.
• Free shape resizing: Added rectangular resize controls for free shape layers.
• High-density spaces: Place spaces for high-density developments without being attached to units, meaning the space fills unallocated areas and nothing else.
• Balcony and parapet for Regions: Set different balcony and parapet heights for each region to further customize your buildings.
• Connecting drive aisles: Toggle on and off Drive aisles connecting distinct logical parking lots. When enabled, at least one connecting drive aisle will be generated for each pair of adjacent lots, with a second generated if there is sufficient room. If max block length is enabled and there's space, this rule will also be applied to the block of stalls between the two connectors.
• Wetland data in web: See the wetlands data layer in the web viewer.
• Data details in web: See data layer details when hovering over layer elements in the web viewer.
• Open deal: Quickly open a deal from the deal map with a new button in the desktop application.

Reported Issues & Bug Fixes:

•  Improved performance of application UI while Generative Design is active.
•  Fixed being unable to manually edit drive spines of dependent fill regions.
•  Fixed a bug that caused increasing the townhouse row minimum to sometimes unnecessarily reduce the number of generated units.
•  Fixed building resize cursor showing when hovering warehouse buildings in 3D.
•  Fixed industrial building's 3D interaction widget being too short.
•  Fixed garage padding not being modifiable in the Structured Parking preset.
•  Fixed a rare crash that could occur when solving gurban regions.
•  Fixed turn radius sometimes not being applied to certain types of corners in parking solves.
•  Fixed max block length sometimes not being enforced correctly on narrow sites.
•  Fixed being unable to manually edit drive spines of dependent fill regions.
•  Fixed a bug that caused increasing the townhouse row minimum to sometimes unnecessarily reduce the number of generated units.
•  Fixed subdivision unit rent not being included in net income.
•  Changed NOI and dependent calculations to use net income.
•  Fixed manually edited townhomes not displaying in 3D with low detail mode enabled.
•  Fixed multifamily buildings with garages failing to render under some circumstances.
•  Fixed nonoptimal parking stall placement at the end of some runs.
•  Improved the quality of parking ring road solutions.
•  Fixed unloading parked drive aisles sometimes unloading too few or too many stalls.
•  Fixed background images being slightly misscaled under some scenarios.
•  Fixed small parking sites sometimes solving inefficiently.
•  Fixed parking stalls sometimes loading against spaces instead of the region boundary.
•  Fixed a rare crash that could happen when swapping presets.
•  Fixed corner and edge grips missing from free shape high-density garages.
• Reduced memory usage.
• Added the ability to filter Generative Design by sub-categories.
•  Renamed the Acres field in the Schemes tab to Site Area.
•  Fixed data centers not behaving properly with high floor to floor values.
• Fixed background images not working properly on low density sites.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when switching views in 3D.
• Fixed default location not taking effect when first set on Welcome screen.
•  Fixed unit stats not displaying for custom garden buildings with manual edits.
• Fixed the connector spacing minimum for parking lots sometimes not being correctly enforced.
• Fixed multifamily solves sometimes failing when they can partially succeed.
•  Fixed an issue where making a manual adjustment to a multifamily building could cause the solve to fail unnecessarily.