How to Check UK Planning Constraints Inside Autodesk Forma Site Design

Forma Site Design's automated context for the UK covers terrain, building footprints and heights, roads and property boundaries, plus weather data for its environmental analyses. That is enough to test massing options and compare sun hours, wind comfort and noise while the design is still fluid.

Planning constraints are a different class of evidence. Flood zones come from the Environment Agency's Flood Map for Planning. Conservation areas, Article 4 direction areas, Tree Preservation Orders and national environmental designations are published by councils and Natural England through planning.data.gov.uk. Listed buildings sit on Historic England's National Heritage List. Ground movement risk comes from the British Geological Survey's GeoSure data. None of these arrive with the Forma site by default, and stitching them together by hand takes an afternoon that most early-stage budgets do not have.

The Atlasly extension does that stitching for the site limit you have already drawn, and keeps each answer tied to its source so it can be checked.

Open a project in Forma Site Design and select Extensions in the left panel, then Add extension. Extensions that have not yet been published to Autodesk's Marketplace are shared by ID and installed from the Unpublished tab: paste the Atlasly extension ID, select Add, then Agree to the terms. Extensions install per project, so repeat this for each project where you want the panel.

Once installed, Atlasly appears in the Extensions tab of the left panel. Draw or select a site limit before opening it; without one the panel falls back to the project location and says so.

The panel needs no Atlasly account. It uses Atlasly's public site tools, the same ones exposed to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants through the hosted MCP endpoint.

Choose a search radius of 250, 500 or 1,000 metres and select Check constraints. The panel retrieves eight official sources live, which usually takes fifteen to forty seconds, and shows an elapsed timer while it works.

The result opens with a verdict line, for example 5 of 8 need attention, followed by chips for high, check, none found and no data. Below it a site map draws the search radius, your site limit and the evidence layers in their own colours; a legend toggles each layer, and a layer that blankets the whole frame, such as a city-wide Article 4 area, is drawn as a dashed outline so it does not hide the rest.

The ledger then lists each constraint with a short value, a planning implication and, where you drew a site limit, how the evidence relates to it: covers your whole site limit, overlaps part of it, or the distance to the nearest edge. Expanding a row shows the evidence text, any coverage caveat, the source records and the retrieval date.

Flood Zone 3 means a flood risk assessment is required and the sequential test applies; for more vulnerable uses the exception test may apply too. Flood Zone 2 also requires a flood risk assessment. Zone 1 is the lowest fluvial and tidal probability but says nothing about surface water, which the panel reports separately when the source answers.

A conservation area brings design, demolition and tree-works controls and usually a heritage statement. Listed buildings nearby make the setting of heritage assets a material consideration, and Grade I or II* assets raise the bar. An Article 4 direction withdraws some permitted development rights; the council text says which classes. Tree Preservation Orders mean works to protected trees need consent, but many councils have not yet published their orders to the national dataset, so the panel reports no data rather than none, and points you to the council register.

National environmental designations trigger ecological assessment and consultation. Registered historic landfill within the radius calls for a contamination desk study. A BGS shrink-swell class of 3 or higher points to a ground investigation and engineered foundations.

The panel ends with three next steps that open Atlas AI centred on the same site with the question ready to run: a full site package with DXF, DWG and IFC exports for Revit, the planning history and approved precedents within the radius, and the adopted local plan policies for the planning authority, cited by paragraph.

The site package is the handover artefact. Its DXF carries the constraint boundaries, contours and surrounding buildings on named layers, and imports into Revit through Insert and Import CAD in metres. Your Forma massing reaches Revit through the Forma Connected Client as usual, so the constraint layers and the scheme meet in the same model. The Atlasly guide to exporting site analysis data to AutoCAD and Revit covers the import settings.

Saving the site to an Atlasly project also enables Site Watch, which re-runs the checks and flags changes in the planning record over time.

The result is a point-radius screen around the site centre. It says whether evidence exists near the centre, not what share of the site it covers, and the site-limit lines in the panel are a planar check against the boundary you drew, not an official parcel intersection. It does not replace a planning search, a flood risk assessment or professional review.

Coverage is UK only: England in full, Scotland and Wales in part. Forma projects with another country code are declined before any check runs. Some sources time out on busy days; the panel then reports that fact for that source rather than guessing.

Inside the Forma scene, Autodesk's renderer draws painted layers in a single style, so one layer is painted at a time; the panel's own map shows any number in colour.