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

What are shape files?

Power BI, at its core, is a program designed to enable us to visualize our data. When capturing our Revit model in Power BI in a visual manner, a suitable architectural diagram to use is a floor plan (a top-down representation of a building level). While we could export a static image of our documentation plans, a far more effective technique is introducing a responsive diagram that visually interacts with the data we capture in Power BI itself.

The most suitable file format to achieve such a workflow in Power BI is .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, or simply Shape file).

Shape files are used extensively in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This type of file helps us to store the shape, location, and attributes of geographical features.

Shape files can store polygons in the form of a list of vertices with attached metadata such as the shape's related name, captured in the same row of data. The following screenshot shows a typical shape file...