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

Introducing Autodesk Dynamo BIM for Revit

To compete with it's natural competitor, Grasshopper, from which it takes partial inspiration, Dynamo was first released in 2013. It is a program backed by Autodesk that essentially lets you interact with any program that contains an API (Application Programming Interface). Since Revit 2017, Dynamo has also become an inherent part of Revit, being accessible through the Manage tab, with no separate installation required.

If you are puzzled by the term API, take a look at the following diagram to understand the context:

Figure 5.4 – The waiter (API) is responsible for communication between the user and the application

Although this is not a chapter on programming and computer science, I want to explain a little more the API/waiter example. Imagine you're sitting at a fancy restaurant table and you have a menu of choices that you can order. When you order something, you know there is an "engine...