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

Setting up the environment

In this section, we will follow a few steps to set up the environment. The goal here is to prepare an Excel file and create a Revit schedule. We will use both of these to export our data and check their values:

  1. The first thing to do is create an Excel file with the name and location of our choice. To do this, open Excel, select a new blank document, and save it. I suggest you name it EXPORT_data to excel on your desktop for didactic purposes.
  2. Then we want to open the Revit sample project. To do this, in Revit's ribbon, we want to click on File | Open | Sample Files. We will open rac_basic_sample_project, as shown in the following screenshot:

    Figure 5.22 – Opening the rac_basic_sample_project in Revit

  3. Create a door schedule with all of the parameters that will be changed. Change the following parameters for this exercise: Description, Manufacturer, and Cost. I assume you're already confident with creating Revit schedules....