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AEC Tech Hackathon 2016

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The Problem

Models are issued during the design process with little or no documentation of the changes made

Drawings are issued during Bid & CA with less than comprehensive identification (clouding) of changes.

Project Managers & BIM Managers need an overview of the changes

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Project:

  • Compare a Revit model to a previous iteration of the same model
  • Display what the changes are in Revit
  • Provide a visualization of the changes

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Process

From the Original File, save a snapshot of the model state.

  • The model state is saved in a SQL Lite Database

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Process

When a newer model is received, compare it to the saved model state

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Process

We defined 4 change types:

  • Elements added to the model
  • Elements deleted from the model
  • Changes in parameters (type or instance)
  • Changes in geometry (location, size)

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Process

The result is a structured, resortable list of the changes made

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Process

Apply colors to current view

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Colors are applied as an override in view

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Process

As multiple iterations are issues, a snapshot can be saved for each, the comparison can be run against any snapshot.

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A JSon file identifying the changes is automatically generated when the comparison is run, for use in the visualization tool

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Process

  • Use the included Dynamo Graph to visualize

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Process

The included Dynamo graph requires two packages

  • Archi_Lab-Mandrill
  • DynamoJson

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The package includes 2 zero-touch nodes

-

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

It doesn’t compare EVERYTHING. We filtered out a lot a lot of changes to the RevitDB that cannot be shown on screen. We should probably filter out more

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

We can tell that something moved, but it doesn’t show where it moved from

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

We can tell that something has been deleted, but we aren’t showing you where used to be

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

After running the compare, you can resort the list, but you cannot re-filter it.

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

We can analyze linked files, still working on applying the colors to the linked model

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

The Visualization Script currently shows one change over one iteration of the model - next step is to show changes over time

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Things it doesn’t do (yet), and other issues to be resolved:

It’s memory intensive

My poor old laptop was not happy, my work machine won’t care

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State of the project:

Project uploaded and available on github

  • Revit Add-In
  • Dynamo Graph
  • Sample JSon data set
  • Zero touch nodes
  • Draft documentation