Address to Building 3D Model

Roovie can turn a street address into a complete, simulation-ready 3D building model.

This is not a rough sketch or a placeholder box. The result is a structured building with floor-by-floor zones, oriented walls, a roof, windows, envelope assemblies, HVAC systems, schedules, and internal loads. It is ready for energy simulation, design work, and portfolio analysis the moment it is created.

The entire pipeline runs automatically from a single address input. No CAD tools. No manual geometry. No file imports.

In One Line

Address in. Simulation-ready building out.

How The Pipeline Works

Street address
  → Geocoding to coordinates
  → Building footprint detection from satellite-derived data
  → Height resolution from multiple authoritative sources
  → Floor count derivation
  → Building record creation
  → Per-floor zone generation with vertices from footprint polygon
  → Surface generation (roof, walls, floor, ceiling)
  → Envelope assembly cloning from templates
  → Window generation with per-orientation ratios
  → Schedule assignment (occupancy, lighting, equipment, thermostat)
  → HVAC system sizing and linking
  → Optional: building group creation for batch results

Each step feeds the next. The output is a fully populated Roovie building.

What Happens At Each Step

Address Resolution

The user types an address. Roovie geocodes it to geographic coordinates, then queries satellite-derived building footprint databases to find the actual building polygon at that location.

The resolution system classifies each result:

• Matched: A single footprint was found at the address. The building is ready to generate.
• Ambiguous: Multiple footprint candidates were found nearby. The user picks the correct one.
• Missing: No footprint was found. The user can draw a footprint manually or select one from the map.

For matched results, the building footprint includes the polygon boundary, calculated area, and perimeter. This is the geometric foundation for everything that follows.

Height Resolution

Building height is resolved through a multi-source hierarchy with confidence scoring:

1. Satellite-derived building data — primary source, high confidence
2. Geospatial mapping services — secondary source, medium confidence
3. Community-maintained geographic databases — tertiary source, medium confidence
4. Floor count tags from open data — floor count-based estimation, medium confidence
5. Fallback estimation — 4 meters default, low confidence

Each resolution records which source provided the height, what confidence level applies, and when it was resolved. This metadata travels with the building for downstream audit and validation.

Floor Count Derivation

If the height source provides a level count directly, that is used. Otherwise, floors are derived from the resolved height at 4 meters per floor with a minimum of 1 floor.

Users can override both height and floor count per building before generation.

Zone Generation

For each floor, Roovie creates a conditioned zone:

1. The building footprint polygon is converted to local 3D vertices using bearing and distance calculations from the centroid
2. Each floor's vertices are elevated to the correct floor height
3. Zone dimensions are calculated: width, length, depth, height, area, and volume
4. Surfaces are generated: roof (top floor only), ceiling (intermediate floors), floor (all floors), and walls (four orientations)

The result is a per-floor zone with properly oriented geometry that matches the real building footprint.

Envelope and Window Assignment

Envelope templates are cloned from modeling profiles:

• Roof assembly: applied to the top floor zone
• Wall assembly: applied to all exterior walls, optionally shared across zones or cloned individually
• Floor assembly: applied to ground-contact and interior floors
• Ceiling assembly: applied to intermediate floors

Window generation uses per-orientation window-to-wall ratios:

• North, south, east, and west facades can have independent glazing ratios
• Window assemblies are cloned from the profile's default window template
• Aspect ratio, sill height, and maximum width are configurable

Schedule and Load Assignment

Each zone receives a complete set of operational schedules:

• Occupancy: weekday, weekend, and holiday profiles
• Lighting: power density and time-of-use patterns
• Equipment: plug load density and schedules
• Thermostat: heating and cooling setpoint profiles
• HVAC operation: system availability schedule
• Ventilation: outdoor air requirements

These come from templates in the modeling profile or are created from defaults based on building type.

HVAC System Sizing

If the modeling profile includes an HVAC template, Roovie sizes and links a complete system:

1. The template is sized using envelope-based or rule-of-thumb load calculation
2. Equipment capacities, airflow rates, and fan power are computed
3. The system is linked to all created zones
4. Control strategies are configured from the profile

The result is a building with a properly sized HVAC system ready for simulation.

Bulk Building Generation

The same pipeline supports batch execution. Users can create dozens to hundreds of buildings from:

• Pasted addresses: one per line or CSV format
• CSV upload: with automatic address column detection
• Map selection: click multiple footprints on the map

All addresses are resolved in batch. The queue shows status for each row: ready, ambiguous, manual required, creating, created, or error.

Each row in the queue can have individual overrides for height, floor count, utility data, and modeling settings. The system deduplicates across input methods so the same building is not generated twice.

After generation, buildings with 2 or more successes can be automatically grouped into a building group for neighborhood-level analysis.

Typical Generation Performance

• A single building with 3 floors and HVAC takes roughly 30 seconds
• A batch of 10 buildings completes in about 5 minutes
• The process can run in the background while the user works on other tasks

Modeling Profiles

Modeling profiles control how generated buildings are configured. A profile includes:

• Building type: Office, Retail, Hospital, School, etc.
• Envelope templates: which roof, wall, floor, and ceiling assemblies to use
• Window generation settings: per-orientation ratios, default window assembly
• Schedule templates: which occupancy, lighting, and equipment patterns to clone
• HVAC defaults: which system template to size and link
• Internal loads: lighting power density, equipment power density, occupancy density, infiltration rate
• Utility rates: default electricity and gas rates for cost calculations

Users can create multiple profiles for different building types or analysis scenarios, then apply them per-building or across an entire batch.

What Makes This Different

Most tools that convert addresses to building models produce a geometric shell. The geometry exists, but it is not ready for analysis.

Roovie goes further:

• The footprint comes from real building data, not a generic rectangle
• Height resolution uses multiple authoritative sources with confidence tracking
• Each floor is a proper thermal zone with calculated dimensions and oriented surfaces
• Envelope assemblies are cloned from templates with real thermal properties
• Windows are generated with configurable ratios per facade orientation
• Schedules and internal loads match the building type
• HVAC systems are sized and linked, not just indicated
• The building is immediately simulation-ready

The gap between "I have an address" and "I can run an energy simulation" is closed in a single step.

Data Source Transparency

Every generated building carries metadata about where its geometry came from:

• Height resolution source and method
• Confidence level (high, medium, or low)
• Matched feature ID for traceability back to the source database
• Resolution timestamp
• Any notes from the resolution process

This audit trail means the building's geometric basis is always inspectable and explainable.

Bottom Line

Roovie's address-to-building pipeline removes the most time-consuming step in building energy analysis: creating the model.

It takes a street address and produces a complete building with real footprint geometry, multi-source height data, floor-by-floor zones, oriented envelope assemblies, windows, schedules, internal loads, and a sized HVAC system. At batch scale, it can populate an entire portfolio from a spreadsheet of addresses.

The result is not a starting point that needs hours of manual refinement. It is a simulation-ready building that teams can analyze, calibrate, and design against immediately.