Release History Archives

TestFit 2.21 & Light Industrial Beta

Why Light Industrial

Over the course of the last year online retailers have exploded in growth, and so has the demand for warehousing those goods. For this reason, and at the request of several of our existing customers, we will be the first to provide a light industrial configurator and feasibility tool.

TestFit Light Industrial is currently in beta. For more information and / or to sign up to be informed when it is ready, check it out.

TestFit 2.21: Garden Updates

In TestFit 2.21, TestFit Inc releases upgrades to the garden apartment configurator following customer feedback, including accomodating mirrored units along a corridor & tall garden apartments.

Support for Double-Loaded and Modular Garden Buildings

Mirrored unit assembly support, and custom vertical circulation dimensions.

Support for Super Tall Garden Buildings

Le Corbousier would be proud. 14 story walkups are now possible.

Support For 100% Efficient Garden Buildings

Several architects and developers employ clever tactics to make their building more efficient. To this end, we have added support for units without any vertical circulation.

Metric Revamp

Added several metric presets, units databases, and garden databases.
Space parking uses stalls per 100 instead of per 1000 in metric.
Fixed SketchUp export scaling when using metric measurements.
Removed the conversion of plans between metric & imperial.

Remove Unit Colors in Plan View

Now a user preference

Other Features

Added parking lines to the SketchUp export.
Added an error marker when the garage tray count is incompatible with a ramp.

Bug fixes

Fixed spaces in the garage exceeding their target size when near a ramp.
Fixed incorrect spaces after dragging units in high density sites.
Fixed spaces with holes rendering incorrectly in the PDF export.
Fixed some missing fields in the PDF tabulation.
Fixed tabulation alignment issues with lots of different sites.
Fixed void spaces producing amenity walls in the Dynamo importer.
Fixed a crash when clicking defining metadata properties for dynamic units.
Fixed some missing manually-placed units in low density sites.

TestFit 2.20: To Massing Mode & Beyond

Why Massing Mode

Since 2017, TestFit users have generated millions of apartment units with our configurator. To that end, TestFit has solved unit mixes, parking garages, complex setbacks, and a myriad of other urban tech problems.

TestFit has always been about confirming assumptions to narrow the range of outcomes on sites. Our global customers have requested a new tool to assist in the creation of those assumptions.

With TestFit 2.20, users can manually craft any shape. We’ve called it massing mode, and the use cases are many. It can be used as a basic massing tool for urban planning, a simple blocking and stacking tool, or a surface parked retail center.

We’re going to show you what is possible and can’t wait to see what use cases you come up with. We’ve also added parking entrances / exits, support for user-defined currencies, multiple garden improvements & more.

Introducing Massing Mode

In TestFit 2.20, TestFit Inc releases a state-of-the-art massing tool with automatic tabulation and surface parking configuration.

This also gave us an opportunity to build out tools for simple (rectangular) & complex shapes alike (we call them spaces). Our customers can use this tool to configure context geometry on their sites and specify prototypes easily.

The simple massing tool in this release has four foundational features:

Layer Order – Sets the space hierarchy with a simple layering system
Shape Style – Either fill the site, create a custom shape, or offset a custom shape
Space Type – Users specify the type of space, and what bucket it should be tabulated in
Tabulations – Instantly tabulated following layer order, space style, and space type.

Included in the space type is parking, and parking can be set to solve with the TestFit configurator. Another space type, voids, can be used to remove building areas. We’ve included 9 typologies of space, including Retail, Multifamily, Hotel, Modular, Housing, Parking, Office, Park, and Civic.

We like to think of it as spatial excel. You’re getting real-time tabulation: of the size, acreage, FAR, unit count derived from size factors and net rentable. Read on to explore all the features packed into 2.20.

1. Define site-filled massings

2. Block and stack site-filled massings

3. Adjust level counts, colors and typologies

4. Block and stack without gravity (enable / disable)

5. Carve away at site-filled massings via the setback at height tool

6. Carve away at the site-filled massings via exclusion zones

7. Carve away at the site-filled massings via custom-shaped void tools

8. Create custom shaped blocks

9. Save and re-use multiple custom-shaped blocks

10. Intersections of geometry are handled and tabulated

11. Layer order is important to determine area hierarchy

12. Void spaces can carve away at custom spaces

13. Setbacks at height can carve away at custom spaces

14. Defining surface parking generates a surface retail deal, while solving for the parking ratio

15. Adding multiple custom spaces to surface parking

16. Buffer spaces for surface parking

17. Buffer spaces for building massing

18. Re-use old sites with presets

19. Expand spaces in 2D with real-time parking updates

20. Expand and move spaces in 3D with real-time parking updates

21. Chamfered radii for buildings allows for curved volumes

22. Custom names and colors for created spaces

23. And you can gravity-drop burgers

If you’re a TestFit client, and looking to get started with Massing Mode, check out our dedicated Knowledge Base article:

Garage entrances & exits

Users can now add garage entrances and exits to parking layouts. The garage entrance can have a side buffer and be placed on any level.

Support for user-defined currencies

Set your own currency. From GBP & Euros to Dogecoin, the world is your currency oyster.

Added manual mode for low density sites

Garden Apartment Improvements

Enabled placement of spaces inside the parking on garden sites.
Improved garden site layouts when bisected by roads.
Improved garden site layouts with custom target parking ratios.
Added an option to rotate corner units in some garden building types.
Added rotational snapping for garden and townhouse buildings in manual mode.
Added two new garden building types: one with units around a single stair, and one with no corridors or cores.
Added a default garden database for 4 story walkup buildings.

Other improvements & bug fixes

Changed amenity rents in the deal editor to use net area instead of gross.
Added snapping to the rotation tool when aligned drawing is enabled.
Increased the maximum floor height to 50′.
Lowered the minimum balcony depth to 6″.
Doubled the maximum UI scale for high DPI monitors.
Added parking stall lines to the Dynamo importer.
For low density sites, stall average is now tabulated for surface parking in addition to garages.
Fixed setback interaction lines extending outside the site.
Fixed low-detail parking spaces not showing up.
Fixed the default floor load values for metric plans.
Fixed sites ignoring easements when they were entirely surrounded.
Fixed a crash placing easements through garden sites.
Fixed missing unit, space, and easement labels in the PDF export.
Fixed a crash for centered balconies slightly narrower than their units.
Fixed missing garage liner mass on some sites with structured fill garages.
Fixed some 3D context buildings clipping through the site.
Fixed a crash placing inside corner units with large facade chamfers.
Fixed a case where the camera took a wrong turn transitioning from 2D to 3D.
Fixed inconsistent garage locations after copying a site.
Fixed un-interactive setback edges when the setback distance is very large.
Fixed a few crashes from complex boundary & setback combinations.
Fixed a crash when changing the parking type from manual mode.
Fixed 3D context buildings casting shadows despite being hidden by the site.
Fixed outdated shadows when toggling 3D context buildings.
Fixed amenities not contributing to lot coverage on garden sites.
Fixed multifamily units mirroring after another was dragged.
Fixed a crash when dragging some multifamily units loaded from an rsd file.
Fixed incorrect corridor lengths from entries in square garden buildings.

TestFit 2.19: Garden Apartments & Exclusion Zones

America’s most popular for-rent housing style by volume is by far Garden Apartments. Today we release a fully functional garden building editor, site plan configurator, manual edit tools, and exclusion zones. This is TestFit’s fourteenth configurator!

Garden Building Editor

For the first time, we’ve taken a Kit-Of-Parts approach to building-level data with garden apartments. With the building editor approach, you can effectively nest units into buildings, and then replicate the buildings with units included.

Intelligent parametric editor. Can reuse units, mitigate circulation space automatically, have stairways automatically move based on changes such as corridor width & more.

We’ve added to our existing co-creation tools and have improved our site entry tools.

Garden Site Solver

Input building + site + parking = automatic allocation of buildings & parking across the site

Automatic surface parking ratio solving

Garden Site Manual Mode

Adjust your automatically-generated geometry on the fly.

More about Manual Mode.

Discover how to use all the new garden apartments features in our Knowledge Base article:

Introducing Exclusion Zones & Ponds

Introduction of exclusion zones to cut garden and office sites, with custom color and labelling.

Introduction of ponds for all site types

Surface parking improvements

Added snaps to simplify drawing adjacent parallel parking rows for manual mode, site boundaries, and roads.

Other improvements & bug fixes

Added a preference to save to older SketchUp versions.
Added a log out option to the menu bar.
Improved map tile loading for high dpi screens.
Fixed missing text showing setback distances in the plan view.
Fixed outdated manual mode geometry when moving or rotating a site.
Fixed undo/redo behavior for several manual mode operations.
Fixed manual surface parking layouts when surrounded by massing.
Fixed manual mode remove parking option deleting the wrong segments.
Fixed GUI drag handle size for high-dpi screens.
Fixed “apply to all edges” operation for site setbacks.
Fixed over-counted street parking stalls in master plan parking tabulation.
Fixed cent values in the deal editor for abbreviated inputs.
Fixed some amenities being un-interactive after duplication.
Fixed the color swatch button sometimes closing the amenity context menu.
Fixed some duplicate walls in the Dynamo Parts node.
Fixed townhouse driveway placement for units without a garage.
Fixed missing stairs on short dead ends in high density sites.
Fixed corner and dead end units being placed despite their mix set to 0.
Fixed invalid gitf export data when certain road features were present.
Fixed which fields are shown in the PDF tabulation for office sites.
Fixed unit attachments disappearing when working with multiple sites.