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

Adding the user interface

We're now ready to complete the script. I think it's about time to add the icing to the cake! Adding a user interface to a script adds value to our work. It will allow the script to be used by colleagues and peers who don't have Dynamo skills or don't want to open a script to make changes or update variables. All they have to do is press a button from the Dynamo player interface. Then, the Dynamo player will launch the script. If we have developed a user interface, it will come up, asking the user for a few inputs.

We are going to add a few nodes to the beginning of our script. Our goal is to create a simple user interface that asks the user for a directory path. Then, it will pass the directory to the script so that it can be executed. Pretty simple, yet powerful.

Let's learn how to do that:

  1. The first thing you must do is install the Data-Shapes package if you didn't at the beginning of this chapter.
  2. Next,...