An article describing the VI-Suite has been published in ‘Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards’. As the article is open-access, the full text can be accessed from http://rdcu.be/vRj5. The article was co-authored with Filip Biljecki from TU Delft/National University of Singapore and examines the VI-Suite from a geospatial data perspective.
Southall, R., Biljecki, F.
The VI-Suite: a set of environmental analysis tools with geospatial data applications
Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2(1), Sep 2017, 23
Abstract: The VI-Suite is a free and open-source addon for the 3D content creation application Blender, developed primarily as a tool for the contextual and performative analysis of buildings. Its functionality has grown from simple, static lighting analysis to fully parametric lighting, shadowing, and building energy analyses. It adopts a flexible, mesh geometry based approach to the specification of calculation points and this has made it suitable for certain types of 3D geospatial analyses and data visualisation.
As this is the first paper that describes the VI-Suite the article can be used to cite the VI-Suite. The bibtext formatted citation can be downloaded here.
An image from the paper is shown below.
Annual irradiance on a building facade