Revit Sheets, ISO19650 and Naviate

When working with Revit and ISO19650 the naming requirements (information containers) are a concatenation of multiple fields such as the project reference, originator, level, zone etc. The temptation for many is to simply type this very long string into the Revit Sheet Number. However, as many of you have probably realised, the consequences of this approach are not desirable!  An obvious issue is the referencing of the drawing number on sections, elevations, and callouts!

The answer is to create shared parameters that build up the required information containers. These can be used to form the drawing number and used to organise the sheet views in Revit, very useful for large projects. Some of the shared parameters will be added to project information (global for the project) and others for the sheets (each sheet can have a different value).

The sections, elevations and callouts can then simply reference the Sheet Number, or for multi-disciplinary design can also include the ‘Role field’ to provide a unique number. For example, ‘S-1040’ or ‘A-1040’.

This all looks very promising until you need to issue PDFs and DWGs with the correct ISO19650 naming convention. If you batch plot or export AutoCAD DWGs from Revit, you will have a file name such as:

Project Name – Sheet – 1010 – GROUND FLOOR GA

Clearly, this does not meet the ISO19650 naming conventions and your documents will be rejected by the CDE (Common Data Environment).

A very useful solution is to use the Publish tool from the Naviate tools. This is located on the Naviate ribbon in the documentation panel as shown below.

Once the Publish tool has been launched you will be presented with the following dialog. Here you can configure and save your various deliverables. These can be formats such as PDF’s, DWG’s and IFC’s.

You can set up the configuration of each format to generate the files that are automatically named to conform to your naming convention, in this case, ISO19650. You can reference shared parameters from the sheets or project to concatenate the file name.

Once the settings are configured and saved this becomes a single-click operation to create all the outputs required for the weekly delivery of documents and information saving countless hours, manual renaming and potential typos of document names!

Feel free to download our trial and test out the workflow for yourselves. You can download the appropriate version of Naviate for your industry here!

https://www.naviate.com/naviate-for-revit/

Have a good Friday!

LawrenceH

Revit Tutorial – Naming PDF and DWG exports to match ISO19650

Many of you working with large Revit projects are probably utilising the BIM naming conventions outlined in ISO19650. Just for your reference, the naming system may look similar to the sheet below.

Below is a screen capture of the properties of the sheet, you can clearly see the use of shared parameters to hold the values such as the Originator, Volume,Level and so on.

The problem starts when you are required to generate PDFs or DWGs from the Revit project to issue or upload to a Common Data Environment (CDE). The naming convention, of course, needs to comply with ISO19650 but Revit will give you something like the output below:

Fortunately, we can employ Dynamo to rename the documents for us to match with the correct ISO19650 naming convention. The basic process is to collect the ISO19650 shared parameters from the sheet and concatenate these together using hyphens to generate the correct document name. The name is then concatenated with the file path and this forms the new name.

We then get the contents of the directory that the PDFs were published to and just get the PDFs that match the drawing number. For example, the drawing number could be 1070 and this can be used to get the original PDF name that contains this number. It is essentially a wildcard match (*- 1070 -*)

A python script is then employed to do the actual renaming in the operating system.

You may want to watch the YouTube Tutorial which shows the dynamo script in operation and steps through the graph and explains whats happening.

Here is a high res image of the Dynamo script if you want to recreate it for your own use.

Revit 2021: Essentials Training for Structures

Some of you may have been Furloughed or unable to work during the current COVID-19 crisis and I am continuing to create tips and tricks, tutorials and videos that are suitable for intermediate/advanced users of Revit. However, there are many of you that are possibly still using 2D CAD applications that would like to move into Revit for project delivery, or those that may want to revisit the essential skills required to use Revit.

I have started to create a course that is FREE and hosted on my YouTube channel. Additionally, I have created a website that hosts the required datasets that are needed for the online course. Currently I have the first module created (40 mins)

I am continuing to build the course and hope to cover all the essentials skills to work with Revit 2021 using Steel, In-Situ Concrete & Precast Concrete. The course is project based and builds on skills learnt on previous tutorials to build a full structure from a blank template.

You can find a link to the datasets here:

https://autodesk-revit-tutorials.yolasite.com/

and here for the YouTube Playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLniefJdncUchAjxf-HVtXZTrkcoenAjKk

Hope this helps people to start their Revit learning! Feel free to comment on the video series and make suggestions!

Enjoy,

LawrenceH

Revit 2021 Tutorial – Structural Data Extraction Part 2

In part two of this tutorial we will look at utilising the MS Excel workbook that was exported from Revit 2021 in Part 1. If you did not work through part one of the tutorial, here is the link:

https://revitstructureblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/revit-2021-tutorial-structural-data-extraction-part-1/

The primary part of this tutorial will be looking at Microsoft Power BI and importing the MS Excel workbook. Obviously, you can present the data directly in MS Excel by using the inbuilt tables but Microsoft Power BI has better tools for presentation and data visualisations and allows data tables to be referenced to each other via unique keys. Another advantage is that the dashboard can be shared via a weblink to anyone that wants to consume the data.

Just as a quick recap, when exporting Revit model data via ODBC, Revit creates a data table for each model category. Additionally, the tables are differentiated by instance and type.

In the image below you can see the worksheet for the floor instance.

Below is the table representing the floor types

Working with Microsoft Power BI

Once Microsoft Power BI is running the interface should look like the image below. In this tutorial I am using the desktop version.

The first step is to connect to a data source. In this case we will connect to our Microsoft Excel workbook. On the Home ribbon click Excel.

You then browse to your MS Excel file. Power BI will then connect to the data and present the Navigator. In this example we will select the following tables:

• Floors
• FloorTypes
• Levels
• StructuralFraming
• StructuralFramingTypes

 

Click the Load button. This will take a few moments to load in the data from MS Excel.

 

Before we start working on the visualisations, we need to create some relationships between the type and instance properties. Revit creates unique keys to enable this linking.

In Power BI click the model icon.

You will then see the selected tables presented. You can move and drag these around on screen to fit everything into view.

Click the Manage Relationships icon as shown below. This will enable the linking of data so we can visualise both the type and instance properties.

In the Manage Relationships dialog click the new button in the bottom left of the dialog.

Configure the dialog box as shown in the image below. Note that the data columns are selected (TypeId and Id) These are the unique keys that tie the instances to types.

Click OK and then close. The tables now have a relationship.

We can now start to visualise the data. Click the Report Icon as shown below.

On the Field panel click the Type Name as shown below. You will see a table presented on the page.

Now open the Floors table and select volume. Notice that this new field is added to the same table. You can now select a visualisation for the data.

This is just a simple example of a chart, you can continue to make additional relationships with other tables and create a dashboard to better understand material quantities of your structural elements.

Hope this helps.

LawrenceH