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

Identifying what data to track in Revit

In this section, we are going to explore both the criteria and a list of data categories we will be targeting later inside our Dynamo script. Before we create our dashboards, we need to identify what data to gather and, more importantly, why we need to gather it. To help us identify what to track, the data needs to fulfill certain criteria.

Criteria

Before building the Revit model check dashboard, we first need to identify what data to track, and what data will later be visualized. "There are five important criteria to think about when deciding what to track" (Kunkel, J. (2019). Revit Dashboards the Cheap and Easy Way, Autodesk University):

  • Quantifiable: The data is countable.
  • Trackable: The data is within the Revit model.
  • Changes over time: The data is changeable over the different project phases.
  • Impact on model performance: The data affects the model's integrity or "health." This criterion...