Automate location creation in Field

[rickmc]

How tediuous is creating locations manually once you import your project heirarchy via excel import.  Pick a room, apply to the uploaded PDF and draw your blue box...  There's gotta be a way to automate this especially when there are THOUSANDS of locations to setup...  enough said.

What if in Revit you could have the ROOM SPACES drive the location creation in Field - automating the manual process.  

This could also be an opportunity to upload your 2D plans to B3F right from Revit so it can eliminate the pdf upload process...

The workflow would be - setup your room spaces in Revit, export to Field and once it is in B3F, goto library and click on generate room locations.

Obviously there would be upstream and downstream steps as this does not address how a project will be organized within Field.  But typically we create a location per room...  

Does this make sense?

 

[jlannen]

We had the same idea for our projects, alot of work goes into creating viewpoints and locations in the model, it seems only logical this work could be imported into BIM 360 Field and eliminate a ton of wasted time doing duplicate work.

[orie.wall]

Most jobs we do don't have rooms, allow the locations to be created by project grids

[krystian.macek]

Rick, 

What portion of your PDF files in BIM 360 field could be directly exported out of Revit?  Do your Revit room locations mimic Field location structure?  If not what are the differences and how would you like to control them?

Thanks for your feedback.

Krystian

BIM 360 Product Manager

[elaratonda]

I'll speak for myself. Here's how I had to hack the locations into B3F.

Unfortunately, the owner did not pay for a BIM model. I had to get the room finishing schedule (pdf) and use the OCR functionality of BlueBeam to get text. Then I copied and pasted that into MS Excel. From there I deleted the useless data and came up with a list of rooms (i.e. alcoves, corridors, stairwells, actual rooms, etc.). From there I had to play with Excel in dividing the building into Areas (A through F) and Floors (1 & 2). After combining columns I had a list of over 300 locations in a hierarchical format that B3F would play nice with. 

Off topic, but then I had to play with a barcode generator and get all that info in the same Excel file so as to associate locations with barcodes. Crazy fun. lol

[RichardBinning2010]

To add on to this...Doing the Excel dance with revit schedule exports is less than ideal but still better than typing in all those locations.  

It would be nice to be able to add additional locations via the excel import process.  Currently, if you try to import a second excel location template, NO paths generated in the new excel get accepted.  All new locations default to the top level, forcing one to select all the new imports and use the "Move" button.

[RichardBinning2010]

What portion of your PDF files in BIM 360 field could be directly exported out of Revit?  - Many are direct plots - like exterior elevations, overall plans, site plans, and roof plans, but it is very efficient for our Architects to be able to open a location (that is Room based) and be able to attach pins in a pdf that is zoomed to the boundary of the Room with a crop box that is offset 48" from the edge of the room.  I built a dynamo graph that automates the view creation process.  The sticking point is the offset creation loop that must be applied as the crop region to effectively isolate each room. I've got an assistant working on extending the dynamo graph.

Do your Revit room locations mimic Field location structure?  - yes and no.  For Architectural site visits yes they do. Additional locations are created for exterior review and roof as well as elevations.  Those are not as numerous, so typically I just leave them at the bldg location level and generate hyperlinks.  Would be really nice to be able to generate hyperlinks within the pdf and have Field parse them and apply to them to the same named file within the project structure.

If not what are the differences and how would you like to control them?  See above

[rickmc]

Krystian, Sorry I haven't been keeping up with the conversation and thank you all for providing such great input.

RichardBanning: Funny, we built a dynamo app to do something similar for creating the views.  We should compare and contrast our scripts.  Ours were done quickly and didn't solve the problem, but helped us with our equipment module process to track rooms as equipment which integrates the BIM much better.   

Krystian:  All or Most of the rooms (floor plans) can be exported from Revit into field, or Revit to PDF and read in bluebeam which would bring in the room space or you can create your own space within Bluebeam which can then be exported into Excel...  

However, once in field, There is a process challenge that may complicate things.  For managing production flow, we would need to adjust the location hierarchy in order to define larger areas to meet our locations need which maps to the flow of work.  So if you have a square building with lots of rooms, we have three teir location.  1. Floor level, 2. quadrant (for example) and then 3. rooms within.  The Revit automation of locations would solve the final teir, but the the top 2 tiers will need to be addressed.  The 2nd tier is driven by the superintendant...   We may decide to group multiple rooms...

Hope that makes sense...  I'll be in San Fran meeting with the BIM 360 team on Tuesday (1/19/2016)...  This will come up.

Rick

[fpensa]

Any news on this matter? Last message over a year ago...

[SteveDFThorne]

In reference to the comments about Grids. I feel that both location and grids should be separate categories with drop down selection. These should both be automated when using Revit sheets and Models. Grids can simply be Nearest Grid Intersection.