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

Setting up Power BI with the Synoptic Panel

To display our shape files in Power BI, we will take advantage of the Synoptic Panel custom visual, shown in the following screenshot.

Figure 6.15 – Synoptic Panel

Like Autodesk Dynamo with packages, Microsoft Power BI can include more chart types than just the default ones. Inside Dynamo, we use the package manager to download and install different package versions. With Power BI, instead of using a package manager, we need to download new chart types using the internet browser.

In this example, we are going to download the Synoptic Panel chart, which will be responsible for processing the shape file and "drawing" the floor plan we exported from the Revit model.

To access this custom visual, follow these steps:

  1. From the OKVIZ website, download the Synoptic Panel custom visual. This can be found at https://okviz.com/synoptic-panel/.
  2. Open Power BI.
  3. On the right side of the screen...