Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By : Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil
Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By: Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil

Overview of this book

Business intelligence software has rapidly spread its roots in the AEC industry during the last few years. This has happened due to the presence of rich digital data in BIM models whose datasets can be gathered, organized, and visualized through software such as Autodesk Dynamo BIM and Power BI. Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data helps you understand and implement computer science fundamentals to better absorb the process of creating Dynamo scripts and visualizing the collected data on powerful dashboards. This book provides a hands-on approach and associated methodologies that will have you productive and up and running in no time. After understanding the theoretical aspects of computer science and related topics, you will focus on Autodesk Dynamo to develop scripts to manage data. Later, the book demonstrates four case studies from AEC experts across the world. In this section, you’ll learn how to get started with Autodesk Dynamo to gather data from a Revit model and create a simple C# plugin for Revit to stream data on Power BI directly. As you progress, you’ll explore how to create dynamic Power BI dashboards using Revit floor plans and make a Power BI dashboard to track model issues. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to develop a script to gather a model’s data and visualize datasets in Power BI easily.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Overview of Digitalization and BIM Data
5
Section 2: Examples and Case Studies from Experts around the World
10
Section 3: Deep Dive into Autodesk Dynamo

Understanding the Dynamo UI and its basic components

In this section, we are going to learn the basics of the Dynamo user interface and features. When we start creating our scripts, it is necessary to know the Dynamo UI. Let's start by opening Autodesk Dynamo first.

To access Dynamo, we can open up Revit, navigate to the Manage tab, and then, on the far right of the screen, at the Visual Programming section, we can click on the Dynamo icon. If you have more than one version installed, a tab will appear to let you choose which version you want to use as default. The following screenshot shows where to find the Dynamo icon inside Revit:

Figure 5.7 – Dynamo icon under the Manage tab, on the far right

Clicking on the Dynamo icon will start the program. Now, let's learn about its basic options by commenting on the following diagram:

Figure 5.8 – Dynamo start up interface

So, the start up interface is pretty straightforward...