Data Visualization with Dynamo-Revit

Hello, colleague! This time I want to share with you points of view and tools on a subject that interests me a lot in particular and I find it very useful in any industry, and especially in ours, I am referring to data visualization . I will tell you my opinion about the importance of data visualization in the #AEC industry (I would like to know yours) and I will pass you the data on 3 packages of Dynamo nodes to visualize data easily and quickly, even in real time for when we are iterating design options.

I think that the visualization of the data of our BIM models can be a good stimulus for modelers who are not yet so aware that there is something more important there, in their model, than the geometry that jumps out ... the data, to do it evident and push this awareness when modeling. And above all, it can help improve communication, both between collaborators who participate in a project, and with the client or developer.

A graph and a schedule can say the same thing, but they do not communicate it the same.

This visualization of model data can be achieved with different tools, ranging from perhaps the best known and most used (and manual), which would be to export our Revit tables and import them into a spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets), once this data in the spreadsheet, use it to create graphs. To what would be the other extreme ... write code and create our applications for data visualization that make this process much more automatic.

This time we are not going to go to one extreme or the other, we are going to focus on an intermediate solution, both in complexity and in automation, which will be to pull Dynamo, which being a visual programming software can be used even without knowing how to write code and that by being directly connected to our Revit model you can collect the data from it and update any modification of these in real time. We could take advantage of this agility of Dynamo and its connection with Revit to also bring that data to Power BI, but this time we are going to stay within Revit-Dynamo, without leaving there, and for this we are going to take advantage of 3 packages of custom nodes that we can easily download and that are focused on data visualization:

• Data Shapes
• NodeModelCharts
• Mandrill

I will start with Data Shapes because of these 3 node packages it was the first one that I met and started using a couple of years ago. Like the other 2 node packages that we will see, this package can be downloaded in Dynamo directly from the Packages menu and the Search for a Package option, we write Data-Shapes and download the package.

Data Shapes is a node pack created by the company of the same name, it focuses on process automation in Revit and Dynamo. Here is the link to their website:

And in their blog they share they have articles about several of the things you can achieve using their Data Shapes node package and their Dyna Maps extension, how to model the environment in an automated way using Bing Maps data, create user interfaces for your Dynamo Scripts , and create graphs to visualize the data of your model in Revit, which is exactly what interests us in this article, but I leave you the link to the blog so you can review the other applications.

About the use of this node package I have made a couple of videos that can be of use to you, I leave them here:

The second node package that I want to share with you is NodeModelCharts, developed by Keith Alfaro. This node pack leverages the open source Live Charts API to display charts using WPF.

And here is the link to the video that I have uploaded to my channel about visualizing Revit data with Dynamo + NodeModelCharts.

The third node pack I want to tell you about is Mandrill, created by konrad K Sobon, if you are a Dynamo user maybe the name sounds familiar... yes, he is the creator of the archi-lab node pack another very interesting and useful dynamo library.

Mandrill uses the power of D3.js which, in the words of the creator of Mandrill, is the best library that exists for data visualization, and that being a JavaScript library intended to be used in a web browser, the challenge was to find the right one. way to take advantage of it from Dynamo, and of course ... he did it!.

Some examples of Mandril from the website:

Another option, in addition to these libraries that save us from writing all the code that their developers have already written, would be to just put our hands in code, in the latest versions of Dynamo the PythonScript node engine is CPython, so we can now connect with libraries for data visualization such as Matplotlib or Seaborn, but that is the subject for another blog post...

Well, whatever the library of nodes for data visualization we choose, or to do it by writing with code, I am convinced that it will help both to be more aware of the data that we are generating in the BIM models and to communicate in a more effective what happens in the project and what would happen with each possible decision made about the project.

If you found the article interesting and you want to talk about it, do not hesitate to write to me, and thank you for sharing and recommending it.

Until next week!.