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

Importing and formatting the datasets

OK. Our journey to build Power BI charts starts with Microsoft Excel. Let's open up the Excel file we generated in Chapter 10, Gathering a Revit Model's Data from Multiple Models at Once. Before we start using it, however, we need to make a change to the Dynamo script. I don't know if you noticed, but the scale we exported from the Sheets category shows decimal values and not the actual scale. If you saw it, great! Kudos to you! If you don't, don't worry, I'll show you how to fix that in a minute.

So, if you open the Excel file, you'll see that each scale value of each sheet is wrong, the reason being is that when we print something such as 1:100 to Excel, it will be interpreted as numbers to divide. So, Excel will calculate the result of the operation 1:100, and it will type 0.011111.

However, we won't need to add any node to the script to fix the issue. We only need to remove one. Let's follow...