As 2021 comes to a close, we’re celebrating the strides Giraffe has made to create a comprehensive, intuitive platform for early stage real estate planning over the past 365 days.
We’re proud of what we accomplished over the past year and can’t wait to share the highlights with you!
Highlights from 2021
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January
Sunlight analysis on building facades and open spaces
The Solar app in Giraffe allows you to see the amount of sun your designs receive as a heatmap analysis directly on your 3D designs or as a chart. Control the date range and timeframe to see the sunlight hours in the context you need.
Create and share layers across projects and teams
Make your assets available across your organization and easy to update. Access Giraffe’s Layer Library or upload and save your own layers. Giraffe is compatible with a range of formats such as, but not limited to, vector data (e.g. shapefiles, GeoJSON or DFX), raster data (PNG or JPG), ESRI servers, or Mapbox layers. Uploaded layers may be added to multiple projects or shared with a user or organization.
February
Advanced drawing tools
Quickly access advanced drawing tools at your fingertips with a click of the spacebar. Easily draw polygons, rectangles, lines, and points. Or select a design and move it easily with a Base Point Move.
March
Detailed building design
Buildings on your map have outlines for an architectural look and feel. Control your design with the ability to hide floors, disable facades.
Buildings cast and receive shadows
See shadows cast by your buildings and designs on your map in 3D. See your designs in context of the existing built landscape to calculate your project’s shadow’s impact.
April
All new Urban metrics
Get all your Urban metrics at a glance in context of your map and design for making easy updates. Quickly get detailed GBA, GFA, or NSA metrics by Usage, building, or Group. See breakout details on FSR, project analysis, and residential metrics. Design in tandem with your data populating in real time.
Draw buildings using a line.
The capability to draw buildings with a line makes it simple to draw complicated shapes with multiple points.
May
Parking App upgraded
Get accurate parking bay estimates with detailed parking creation in Giraffe. Create on grade, multi-deck, or underground parking for your project. Control details such as bays (length, width, angle), roada (width), islands (population, size), lanes (axis), and corners. Add exclusion zones to account for elevators or ramps
Publish project to public URL
Easily create publicly accessible views of your project. Create unlimited versions of your project. Each will be a snapshot of the project from when the public version was created.
June
All new admin portal with more project settings
An updated admin portal provides additional governance controls and oversight. View your account and workspace(s). Admins can see their organization, add new users, and easily control accessibility and license type.
Export High Resolution Screenshot
Export a clean, high resolution screenshot of your project to use in reports and presentations.
July
Markers, labels, and annotations
Giraffe supports a variety of markers, labels, and popups to provide context and enrich your map and designs. Now you can add labels, using text or information from the feature such as gross floor area of a building, or the length of a line. oR USMarkers can be styled in a wide variety of ways. Images can be uploaded or text can be formatted and stylized in many different ways. Popups, which will appear when a user clicks on a marker, can also be added. Popups can contain media, formatted text and links to other pages.
August
Places
With Places you can create immersive geospatial experiences to showcase your project and beautifully represent your vision. Start by leveraging your approved design as the basis of your presentation. Build an engaging experience with an interactive 3D map and enriched media pins for additional detail. Then create your narrative by tying your story to visual context, by panning viewpoints on the map. See Places used for NSW's Tech Central Precinct here.
SDK v0.1
Now with our SDK, it’s easy to customize Giraffe with apps, widgets & workflows. Making designing and developing cities more fun, fast and collaborative. Allowing web developers to easily connect their own web app to the Giraffe platform. They can leverage Giraffe authentication, hosting, geometries, layers and more to get from prototype to production faster.
September
Kanban Board Beta
Keep your Giraffe projects organized with an intuitive kanban board system with list, tile and board views. Draw projects in from your personal workspace or your organization’s workspace. Create different boards to visualize project progress and prioritize tasks. You can define each stage of your project to see what’s important, spot roadblocks, and identify areas of improvement by grouping and sorting your columns and color coding your cards.
October
Design Library
Design Library allows you to easily access, manage and organize all of your past massings and designs from a single place. Easily re-use past buildings, designs or layouts in new projects. Maintain clean libraries for ease of use within your organization with clear naming conventions and search capabilities.
3D Model Import
Importing external 3D models to your map provides the flexibility to create even more detailed experiences. Simply import glTF or GLB files from and add the property to your map. Plus—imported 3D models cast shadows, like your 3D designs built directly in Giraffe, for a seamless user experience.
November
Finance 2.0
Finance turns a Giraffe design into a detailed, categorized cost and income breakdown that looks and feels like your proforma. You’re now capable of developing more accurate detailed visibility for your feasibility studies.
Finance now provides you with access to all the numbers you’d typically use in a spreadsheet, like areas, lengths, building footprints, and facades, that are directly from your design.
Precinct
Complex developments can quickly grow large and unwieldy, becoming difficult to keep organized. In Giraffe, you can break down large precincts into scenarios that help you navigate your development and see each scenario’s key metrics.
Scenarios help you better understand your development. Allowing you to segment your site into lots or see your site by building design (like residential or commercial use spaces). And, once your scenarios are set up, buildings and lots can continue to be adjusted. Metrics will update in real time in the Precinct app.
What's next?
We intend on continuing to extend Giraffe’s capability set and coverage. This includes adding more apps, plug-ins, and partners to help bring you more experts, consultants & data directly within the Giraffe platform.
Over the last year the Giraffe platform has seen rapid expansion to directly impact the velocity of your early stage planning efforts. In 2022, we will continue developing products and features that are intuitive and easy to use. Expect to see more detailed, comprehensive calculation capabilities for feasibility planning, and expanded governance to manage your organization.
Last but not least, we’re continuing our efforts to make Giraffe even more intuitive and easy to use, while improving performance.
