Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

by Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil
Released November 2021
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781801073981

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Learn how to make optimum use of your BIM data using Dynamo to make better design decisions and create feature-rich dashboards using Power BI to track your model's data

Key Features

  • A go-to guide for AEC professionals to analyze and manage their data
  • Explore popular use cases and best practices from experts around the world
  • Create efficient dashboards using Dynamo and Power BI

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

  • Understand why businesses across the world are moving toward data-driven models
  • Build a data bridge between BIM models and web-based dashboards
  • Get to grips with Autodesk Dynamo with the help of multiple step-by-step exercises
  • Focus on data gathering workflows with Dynamo
  • Connect Power BI to different datasets
  • Get hands-on experience in data management, analysis, and visualization techniques with guidance from experts across the world

Who this book is for

This book is for BIM managers, BIM coordinators, design technology managers, and all AEC professionals who want to learn Autodesk Dynamo to analyze, manage, and visualize their BIM data as well as understand some associated computer science topics. You need to have a background in BIM and knowledge of what a BIM model is to make the most of this book.

Table of contents

  1. Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data
  2. Contributors
  3. About the authors
  4. About the reviewer
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Download the color images
    6. Conventions used
    7. Get in touch
    8. Share Your Thoughts
  6. Section 1: Overview of Digitalization and BIM Data
  7. Chapter 1: Introducing Units of Digital Information
    1. Exploring the beginning of the digitization era
    2. Learning how simple digital data is
    3. Getting to know types of digital data
    4. Understanding how much data we produce
    5. Learning about hybrid jobs
    6. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: Understanding Data Centers
    1. Understanding data centers
      1. Learning the different types of cloud solutions
      2. Introducing the first data center in history, ENIAC
      3. Learning about The Citadel and Project Natick
    2. Getting started with Power BI
      1. Setting up Power BI and exploring the World Happiness Report
      2. Creating your first dashboard
      3. Customizing and filtering the chart
    3. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: Warming Up Your Data Visualization Engines
    1. Getting started with data visualization
      1. Scatter plot
      2. Column chart
      3. Bar chart
      4. Stacked bar chart
      5. Line chart
      6. Pie chart
      7. Radar chart
      8. Waterfall chart
    2. Why analyzing BIM data is important
    3. Exploring Microsoft Power BI charts
      1. Downloading and importing the dataset
      2. Formatting the other values
      3. Creating the column chart
      4. Creating a waterfall chart
      5. Creating a line chart
    4. Summary
  10. Section 2: Examples and Case Studies from Experts around the World
  11. Chapter 4: Building a Data Bridge between BIM Models and Web-Based Dashboards
    1. Technical requirements
      1. Installing Visual Studio Community
    2. Identifying the problem
    3. Creating your first Revit plugin
      1. Understanding the environment
      2. Configuring dotnet framework and PresentationCore.dll
      3. Installing the Revit dll
      4. Updating your local repository
      5. Updating the RibbonBar.cs file
      6. Testing the plugin startup
      7. Exploring the toolbar
    4. Preparing Microsoft Power BI
    5. Building the Power BI report
      1. Visualizing the data in Power BI
      2. Publishing and sharing your final report
    6. Summary
  12. Chapter 5: Getting Started with Autodesk Dynamo and Data Gathering
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding visual programming
    3. Introducing Autodesk Dynamo BIM for Revit
    4. Understanding the Dynamo UI and its basic components
      1. Menus
      2. The upper-right corner
      3. Library
      4. Execution bar
      5. Nodes
      6. Node states
    5. Types of data
    6. Setting up the environment
    7. Exporting data from Revit
    8. Updating data in Excel
    9. Importing data back into Revit
    10. Summary
    11. Further reading
  13. Chapter 6: Importing Revit Plans in Power BI Using Shape Files
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Setting up Dynamo
    3. What are shape files?
    4. Writing our data sources for Power BI
      1. Understanding the script UI window using the Data-Shapes package
      2. Collecting and filtering all the Revit rooms
      3. Exporting room data to Excel
      4. Processing room boundary geometry
      5. Generating the Shape file
      6. Manipulating the shape file to include metadata
    5. Setting up Power BI with the Synoptic Panel
    6. Visualizing our data in Power BI
    7. Summary
  14. Chapter 7: Creating a Revit Model-Check Dashboard Using Dynamo and Power BI
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Identifying what data to track in Revit
      1. Criteria
      2. Potential data to track
    3. Collecting and exporting data using Dynamo
      1. Collecting data
      2. Dynamo script
      3. Exporting data
    4. Building the Power BI dashboard
      1. Importing Excel data
      2. Creating visuals
      3. Inserting a project illustration
      4. Exporting and sharing the dashboard
      5. Updating the dashboard
    5. Summary
  15. Section 3: Deep Dive into Autodesk Dynamo
  16. Chapter 8: Deep Dive into Dynamo Data Types
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Introducing lists and indexes
      1. How to select elements
      2. How to use levels to select elements
    3. Learning IF statements and variables
    4. Concatenating strings
    5. Working with strings (searching and replacing)
    6. Getting to know regular expressions
    7. Summary
  17. Chapter 9: Using Dynamo to Place Family Instances
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Creating the first family placement script
    3. Creating the second family placement script
      1. Environment setup
      2. Introducing the second script
      3. Placing a family instance on each window
    4. Summary
  18. Chapter 10: Gathering a Revit Model's Data from Multiple Models at Once
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Creating the data collector script
      1. Collecting information from multiple models
      2. Collecting information about Rooms
      3. Collecting data from Levels
      4. Collecting information from Sheets
      5. Adding the filename to each list
    3. Exporting the datasets to Excel
    4. Adding the user interface
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  19. Chapter 11: Visualizing Data from Multiple Models in Power BI
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Importing and formatting the datasets
      1. Importing the datasets
      2. Formatting the datasets
    3. Creating the charts
      1. Creating the table chart
      2. Creating the stacked column chart
      3. Creating the donut chart
      4. Creating the scatter plot chart
      5. Creating the map
    4. Summary
  20. Chapter 12: Having Fun with Power BI
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Building the form
    3. Understanding how to publish the dataset
      1. Connecting the cables on the Power BI side
      2. Completing the Google form
    4. Importing the data and creating the charts
      1. Importing the dataset
      2. Creating the charts
    5. Summary
    6. Why subscribe?
  21. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you

Product information

  • Title: Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data
  • Author(s): Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil
  • Release date: November 2021
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781801073981