Another BIM Blog

My last post touched on further development of model audit scripts with Dynamo.   There was a desire to capture all of the valuable data collected as part of the audit, just running the audit as an issued state check is very useful but once the Excel spreadsheet used to present and record the results is closed all of the data is lost, furthermore there is additional data in the model which would be useful to capture.  For example, c onsider comparing the data for the number of sheets in a model, a fairly broad measure of project complexity and the data showing hours worked from a company time-sheet database. This would allow for more accurate costing on similar future projects.  There are countless similar metrics and with the advent of machine learning upon us capturing vast amounts of data now has never been more important.  We don't yet know what uses there will be for this in years to come.  In order to record the data it's necessary to conne...

An important part of our BIM strategy is the validation and auditing of our BIM Geometry models. This has traditionally been a very analogue process of running through company standard compliance checklists and checking the model error logs for duplicate elements, view naming compliance, view template usage, imported linestyles..... yawn..... duplicate elements and so on. This process can easily take half a day and is therefore normally done at key model sharing stages. I wanted to resolve this, I believe every shared model should be audited for quality in order to minimise errors and part of our BIM delivery QA - enter Dynamo. Using the existing paper based checklists as guidance along with a wishlist of extra checks i'd like to conduct i set about creating the equivalent checks but all beautifully automated with Dynamo. This proved far easier and more intuitive than i thought, nodes already existed for many of the checks i wanted to do... "get the views... get t...

As part of my organisations move towards BIM level 2 i needed to address the way our layers were named when we export CAD files from our Revit models.  Firstly, nobody has ever complained that our layer names were not Uniclass 2015 standard, however, our internal layer naming system seemed to have no standard basis and i wanted a suitable standard for drawings we were producing purely in CAD. The AEC have produced a comprehensive document which explains how to name layers in AutoCAD, for those interested this can be found here  https://aecuk.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/aecukprotocolforlayernaming-v4-0-2.pdf . So... on to the revit export update, i thought, this will be easy, i'll simply visit  https://toolkit.thenbs.com/articles/classification/ , download the .txt file for use in Revit and simply adapt the lineweights to suit our standard and i'll be done!  However, despite an extensive web search i was unable to locate a standard txt file conversion for Revit to...