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

Writing our data sources for Power BI

At this point, we will get our hands dirty!

We need to create our first piece of the script to let us visualize floor plans in Power BI. The first piece of the script usually involves the Data-Shapes package; this is because the package's scope is to create a small user interface to help inexperienced users. Many architects and engineers around the world may only need to interact with a Dynamo script just a little bit. They don't know (and often they don't want to know) how to customize a script in the Dynamo environment, and Data-Shapes is exactly what is needed. It interprets user inputs by using text bars, buttons, and other UI elements we are all used to, and then it transfers those inputs to the Dynamo engine to complete the script execution.

From this point onwards, it is strongly suggested that you have the Dynamo script provided in the shared folder open; this is so you can check Dynamo throughout the development...