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

Creating the data collector script

Let's start by opening Revit to create a new empty model. We will use an empty model just to start Dynamo, as we will ask Dynamo to open multiple Revit models in the background.

Follow these simple steps to start things out:

  1. Open Dynamo and create a new script file.
  2. Although it's empty, save the file in a folder on your PC.

    Important Note

    It's good practice to keep a saved file and make sure to save the file regularly as Dynamo can sometimes freeze, and you will lose your work. It's happened to me several times, and it's not a pleasant feeling, to be honest!

  3. Set the running mode to Manual for now.

Perfect – we're ready to continue. The first thing I would like to do is collect model information, and once we have that, we can send that data to a new list of items. We will do that for every category of information we will collect from those models. In the end, we will have a list made up...