Calling Future Construction Leaders

I usually don't advertise for anything on my blog but I thought I share this advertisement with my blog readers mainly for two reasons:

1. Giving construction graduates an opportunity to join one of the most rewarding (in all aspects) graduate scheme in the UK
2. Giving construction graduates an opportunity to join a graduate scheme with well mapped out career development paths including BIM/VDC integration

 If you are interested then click on the following image to download the leaflet and follow the process specified. Good luck!

BIM in Daily Commuting Life

Metro newspaper is part of daily commuting life in London and other 50 cities in the UK and has the distribution of up to 1.3 million copies everyday.

As usual, today I was commuting to work in the piccadilly line reading my copy of Metro. To my delight I saw word BIM in an article. Albeit in an advertisement, it is a sign of BIM going mainstream here in the UK. Here is an extract from the page for non-Metro readers.

Now it's time to get real about BIM!:-)

 "...delivering construction projects increasingly needs newer (digital) skills: professional who can work collaboratively, have digital BIM expertise.."

BOLT-ONS 2014

I am pleased to release BOLT-ONS 2014 today. I have now grouped four of my Revit API plugins under BOLT-ONS.

BOLT-ONS is a collection of Revit API tools developed to enhance efficiency in some day to day Revit tasks.

BOLT-ONS include following commands.

1)  Update Door From/To Room Information - Updates From/To Room information in door schedules

2) Occupancy Load Calculator - Calculates occupancy load for each Room and Area objects based on occupancy load factor specified

3) Custom Area Calculator - Calculates custom area for each Room and Area objects based on custom area factor specified - ***NEW in 2014

4) Room Sheet Generator - Generates Sheets for each room in an active project - ***NEW in 2014



NOTE: Occupancy Load Calculator and Custom Area Calculator included in BOLT-ONS support ROOM and AREA objects.

Go to BOLT-ONS page to get further details.
Please leave any comments/suggestions you may have on BOLT-ONS page.

QC Check BIM Models - Part 2

In the previous blog post Part-1 I touched upon two main QC check categories. In this blog post I will look at the first category in detail.

I have now discussed the software specific checks with some Design/BIM folks and come up with the following software (Revit) specific QC check list.

(1) SOFTWARE SPECIFIC QC CHECKS

The following is a list of minimum items (in no particular order) that should be checked when issuing your BIM Model(s) for coordination.

• Model Naming convention
• Model Origin (shared coordinate)
• All Revit+CAD+DWF+Other links are removed
• Model is purged
• Model elements are on appropriate worksets
• Model elements are modeled using appropriate categories, i.e. floor is not modeled using ceiling command etc. 
• Check in-place families and find out reasons for them being in-place as oppose to custom families. Ask them to be converted to custom families where possible. [this one is biggie for model performance]
• Model elements reflect agreed LOD and LOI as per the project specific BIM Execution Plan
• Model contains agreed elements as per the modelling responsibility matrix set out in BIM Execution Plan
• Model title page is updated with the revision information (if you have one)
• Model title page is set as "Start View" (if you have one)
• Delete sheets, schedules and views as per your office standard protocol
• Family naming convention meets your internal protocol or project specific protocol [suggest you set up QC Check schedules in your template to quickly check critical items such as Walls, Floors, Ceilings, Roofs, Doors, Windows etc.]
• Worksets exist as per the agreed breakdown mentioned in BIM Execution Plan
• Worksets are named as per the agreed naming convention (if you have one in place)

Phew! Good luck with this. I would like to know how many of these QC checks you perform every time you issue your model(s) Or If there are any additional software specific checks you perform.

Please leave your thoughts under comments here so that all readers can see how software specific QC checks are performed universally.

QC Check BIM Models - Part 1

Do you perform a QC check every time your BIM models go out of your office? If Yes, that's great! If No, ...well why not? If your company is ISO 9000 compliant then you should QC check your BIM models every time you share your BIM models with the project team.

Forget ISO 9000 for time being. One could argue that BIM Model(s) (oops!) are not contractual deliverables  therefore we don't QC check them. IMHO, that's just bollocks. If you are generating most of your contractual 2D deliverables from your "For Information" BIM Model(s) then how can you afford to ignore QC checking the single source of your 2D deliverables even though you share your BIM Model(s) "For Information" only?

As you know, BIM is going to become contractual on publicly procured projects by 2016 in the UK. This means your BIM models will become part of contractual deliverables and therefore you will be required to perform QC checks every time your BIM Model goes out of the door.

So what should you be looking for when you perform a QC check? I will throw some ideas here for a starter.

First of all prepare a QC check list with two distinct categories as shown below. Now sit down with your Revit (or BIM for that matter) users and populate software specific check list and sit down with your design team (if you are lucky, your design team would be same as your Revit team) and populate design specific check list.

(1) SOFTWARE SPECIFIC QC CHECKS

(2) DESIGN SPECIFIC QC CHECKS

While you are populating your checklists, I will sit down with my BIM/Design team and populate this checklist in next couple of days and share my list with you soon. Stay tuned!

In the mean time if you have any ideas then please feel free to share with other readers by leaving your comments here.

Revit API - Skipping Unplaced Rooms

Using Revit API, if you want to collect all "Placed" rooms in a given Revit project file and want to skip all "Unplaced" rooms then use the following method.

Get "All" rooms in a project file using standard filter collector method and iterate through each room object to check the following before you add them to your final "Placed Rooms" collection.


// find the rooms, skip those rooms which are not placed but exist in a project file. Checking if Area property of room is 0.0 and location property is null.

                Room tmpRoom = obj as Room;
                if (null != tmpRoom.Location  && Math.Round(tmpRoom.Area) != 0.0)
                {
                    m_rooms.Add(tmpRoom);
                    continue;
                }


The reason why I list this method here is because I used the following up until now and it worked well but for some reason it stopped working in Revit 2013 API while I was updating my plugins. When I checked using Revit snoop database..all unplaced rooms show Level property that they were last placed and deleted and show null property in object type.


// find the rooms, skip those rooms which don't locate at Level yet.

                Room tmpRoom = obj as Room;
                if (null != tmpRoom && null != tmpRoom.Level)
                {
                    m_rooms.Add(tmpRoom);
                    continue;
                }

@UniWestminster @UoWBECi Open Lecture on BIM

Recently, I was invited to deliver open lecture on BIM at the University of Westminster. The brief was to start from BIM What, Why, Benefits and then cover where the UK industry is in terms of BIM, role students have to play and some references.

Here is a link to my presentation video. As usual, there is no audio so no need to put on your headphones! Hope you enjoy this and find it somewhat useful for you. 

Disclaimer: The content of this video is not suitable for any person over (x) years of BIM experience. If you fall under this category and ignore this disclaimer and hit the play button then the author does not take any responsibility of loss of...well, your time!