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 your first Revit plugin

Our scope is to focus the activities on building a data connector from Revit to Power BI. According to this, we are going to use our basic template provided with the GitHub repository. The template gives you a new, ready-to-use Revit toolbar with four sample commands. It's not important how to build that project from scratch, but if you are interested in learning more about Revit plugin fundamentals, I suggest you start with the official documentation at the following URL:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/simplecontent/content/lesson-1-the-basic-plug.html.

At this point, the first thing to do is to set up the environment. This is fundamental in any development software such as Visual Studio. We need to know how to let Visual Studio import the Revit API required to complete the plugin. Let's go.

Understanding the environment

How can we implement software capabilities? How does a plugin work...