Revit Data Exchange for MEP Workflows

SEAN FRUIN: What's up, everybody? And thanks for joining us to Revit Data Exchange for MEP Workflows. And Brian, thanks for being my co-speaker on this.

BRIAN NICKEL: Thanks, Sean, for having me.

SEAN FRUIN: So our tools can do really incredible things. We're doing some really cool stuff with fabrication workflows and everything. Here we got some Dynamo. We have all these different softwares. And the interchange of softwares has been a challenge. And the data in our industry has been a challenge. I'm sure you've ran into that, right Brian?

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, often.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, so maybe-- all right, we can really do some again really cool things with automation. I like to call it the triforce. So you need data, computation, knowledge-- all those things need to come together to be able to do really powerful stuff. But with these data issues, we're kind of like a frustrated Gandalf where he has two of the triforces but missing that third piece of data. So let's see how we can fix that.

There's kind of been an evolution of our suckiness with data, right? So we have the paper age. My first job had-- my boss had a whole bunch of papers on the desk. He was very organized but his desk did look like this. And wasn't really good for automation. Brian, you want to talk about the desktop age and your struggles there?

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, so in my first career job I got into an office and my desktop looked exactly like this from the previous employee that used to work there. And I had to clean it all up. And it sucked. It was horrible. And then we made it into-- we kind of moved into this internet age where now everything lives in Dropbox or Google Cloud or OneDrive. And now we've just taken all that desktop data and moved all that chaos into the cloud.

SEAN FRUIN: Right. And this has kind of led to technical struggles, right? So we have these bulky files that we're trying to move around. And it's hard. This makes us end up being in silos, right? And then the versioning issues that always pop up with these big bulky files because it's hard to share them. There's also the people aspect. If you want to touch on that, Brian. I know we have struggles there.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, we often get little cooperation. There's major skill gaps in terms of just communicating design work and communicating projects between different skill gaps. Whether-- Sean went to school for mechanical engineering, I went to school for architecture. So I have some skill gaps to Sean. And then of course--

SEAN FRUIN: I definitely didn't learn about databases, right?

BRIAN NICKEL: Exactly.

SEAN FRUIN: Or how to share, right, so the coding aspect too that's necessary right now to move this stuff between.

BRIAN NICKEL: And some major security and IP concerns. Where now that we've got everything into the web, we're all worried about our data. And we want to make sure that we're protected.

SEAN FRUIN: And you had one of those in one of our examples, you had a little IP issue. But things are looking better, right? So most recently, we've seen a lot of geometry interoperability stuff with Revit. I've actually been able to-- I got scanned at a conference in like 2019, I think. And just in 2023 Revit, I was able to actually to get my statue of myself. I look pretty good in dynamo gray there. I finally able to get it in.

We have the Parameter Service, a cloud service, that's helping with the shared text files of Parameters. Hey, let's put all this in the cloud. And then we can get rid of those versioning issues and make that a little bit easier. And then the one that we're going to talk about today is Data Exchange. So again, another cloud service. And all this is setting us up for hopefully less suckiness in the future.

So that's what we're going to talk about today is Data Exchange about MEP Workflows. So I'm Sean Fruin. I'm a mechanical engineer turned programmer turned product owner now at IMEG.

BRIAN NICKEL: I'm Brian Nickel. I'm the CEO of Allied BIM. I also am a adjunct faculty at Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana. I'm based in Boise, Idaho. And it's nice to be here today.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, so our agenda is going to be we're going to focus on the MEP engineer. An MEP engineer has all these touch points with architects, over on the left, VDC people up at the top, contractors to the right, and the bottom two people out in the field and fabricators. We're going to explore different workflows, different softwares and how we connect all those.

We're going to try to use mostly The Shodan's Tower that's shipped with Revit 2024. And just do an exploration of how this new service can help. A lot of the stuff is in beta. So we're going to get shocked a little bit. There's a little bit of just beta, new stuff. So be wary of that. To be exact though, we're going to look at Data Exchange is 101. We're going to look at some Power Automate Workflows and how we can connect Revit with our Microsoft tools.

We're going to do around trip from Revit to Inventor and back. We're going to look at some automated coordination workflows, a fun little generative design workflow, Revit to fabrication with Allied BIM. And then we're going to look at the big picture and where the industry is headed with all this.

BRIAN NICKEL: Some of our learning objectives today is to discover that Data Exchanges can help us overcome our data challenges. We're also going to learn some of the many ways that we can create and share Data Exchanges. We're going to explore various use cases for the Data Exchange module in MEP workflows. We're also going to learn how to use the Data Exchange to bridge the Revit model and Microsoft tools gaps.

SEAN FRUIN: Let's first off talk about what is Data Exchange 101. Kind of peek in there, remove the fog that's around it.

BRIAN NICKEL: It's a file.

SEAN FRUIN: So it's a-- no, it's a database.

BRIAN NICKEL: It's a Data Exchange.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, so a exchange-- it's not a file. It is kind of a database. But it's really this way to write to and from databases. It's all hosted on the AEC cloud. So it's kind of in this interim in between. Autodesk's definition is this, right? So the idea is to capture parts of our models to be able to share those parts across many apps. And then because we can really control what we're sharing, there's a lot of trust and we get rid of some of those IEP issues.

So here's a little Data Exchange action. So this is a Shodan tower that we put together. You can see that we have a whole bunch of data exchanges on here through the things. Up there I just did the versioning. So again, we're able to see versioning, when stuff's updated. Here's our loads model, brought up in the clouds. So maybe I can share this. Maybe the architect does the loads. And they can share that with the MEP guy.

Maybe they do a simpler model of their architecture model to be able to do this. So it's really interesting to think how different parts can go into this one kind of file up there. And this is our fire rated walls from the thing and then our conduit. So we're going to use all these Data Exchange and look at how to create them and how consume them throughout the presentation.

BRIAN NICKEL: There's lots of flavors to Data Connectors, and Sean's going to bring up all these flavors. So you can see that on the left we've got like an ice cream cone with a bunch of different flavors from Power BI, Microsoft Automate, Rhino, Inventor, Dynamo, and Revit. Each one of these have their own Data Exchange connector. And it can synchronize right up into the Data Exchange module.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, so kind of the autonomy of Data Exchange. So a connector can either write information or it can read information. And not all can do both. Most of them can do both. So Revit, Rhino, Inventor, Dynamo it can read and write. But then we kind of have these ones Power Automate and Power BI it can only read stuff. But what this gives us is Endless Swim Lanes. You can talk about this, Brian.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah we see these as Endless Swim Lanes. So back to the initial diagram that Sean showed at the beginning, we've got the architect, we've got the designer, contractor, field foreman. And everybody's initiating in their own swim lane one of these data connectors-- whether that's a Revit data connector, a Dynamo, Power BI, et cetera. So these can read and write back to other stakeholders in the project.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so setting up, there's a lot of pre-checks that you have to go. It's one of the hardest parts that I've found setting this up. Not that it's hard, it's just you've got to go through a checklist, right? So on the Autodesk Construction Cloud Hub, you got to make sure that you have work sharing files up there, especially with Revit. You need to have the apps included by an admin person. You need have the right permissions. And then you need to make sure you have the licensing too write.

There's an asterisk there because it's only to write. Actually, somebody without a license can consume the Data Exchange or read it. And then for the apps, there's another set of checklists. So you have to make sure that you download the App. So this is downloading Dynamo sandbox, downloading Rhino, downloading Inventor. You have to make sure you have the license, obviously, for those.

And then you have to make sure you download the connector through the Autodesk App Store for this. So again, like I said, I kind of hit some problems doing all this. This is just from the development team. This is in the handout if you really want to go in the detail, but this is really for the beta ones.

Right, so first thing that came up is I do not have admin access. So I had to reach out to my BIM manager and his first question was, hey, I don't know about this? Is this going to cost tokens? As of right now it does not cost any tokens. But we don't really know what going to do in the future. It's kind of where we're going with this cloud stuff, right?

But I told him no tokens right now. OK. So as you can see, you can go into your AC Account and see if he's have been added by somebody, and see if you have access to them.

BRIAN NICKEL: So we had an example of this come up between Sean and I. So Sean and I kind of experienced an actual problem. I asked Sean to add me to a project. And when he added me to the project, the project was not found. So this was kind of our first little road bump in using it. And then Sean's going to add how we communicated with Autodesk team to make this work for us.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so it's actually really easy, right? So you can add just people that have an AC Account to the hub. You can see a lot of people put work into this presentation to make it happen. A lot of people from the Autodesk team, so thank you. And then we have Brian there and everything. So again, just adding people there. Then there's downloading the connectors. So here's just a quick Google search for the App Store. You can get in there.

For the beta ones, it's not quite as simple, as we'll see. So it's a quick Data Exchange. Here they all are. I go to it. Oh, open the link. But that didn't do anything. Oh no. A little bit investigation you can find, oh, here's the link to get to the community feedback portal. So sign up for that. And then you get in there. And there's all the executable files for the connectors. Oop, next one.

What other problems did we have? Oh yeah, so free trial, right? So I have the AC Collection. I do not have access to Inventor. So I had to give free trial. It works for Inventor and Rhino if you're just trying to explore a little bit and see what's possible. So yeah, so now let's dive into some of the workflows. So the first one is this Revit to Microsoft tools workflow.

So problems, right? Senior engineer, hey, will you open up Revit? Nope, they back away. They don't want anything to do with Revit. So we're going to see how maybe we can get that data out of Revit and then there. Another fun workflow is this cat and mouse game that we play with trying to keep coordination between rooms and spaces. It's not fun. Maybe we can have some alerts there.

And then finally, right, I wanted to look at, hey, can we pull a whole bunch of information, standard, clean, data out? Because it's always been a problem to get that clean data. You try to pull information from a whole bunch of projects. The more projects you pull out, the smellier it gets. So here I just want to highlight some special abilities. I don't know if anyone's played Stratego, if you have, you probably know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you're probably like, what?

Stratego's just a fun game. It's like capture the flag where you bombs. But then you have these tokens, that's like 1 through 10. But some of those tokens have special abilities just like some of our connectors have special abilities. So the Dynamo one you can really be specific with what you're trying to write to a Data Exchange. The Power Automate just goes out to everything, right? So you have the ability to really connect to endless possibilities there.

And then the Power BI one's really cool because it's a really fast way to see what's in your Data Exchange, and to be able to actually work with that Data Exchange. So in this workflow, we're going to start with the architects going to do their modeling and their Revit model. They're also going to do the energy model. Might be a little bit of a stretch, but we're going to run with it.

They're going to use a 3D view with the Revit connector to make a Data Exchange for rooms and a Data Exchange for the energy analysis stuff. We can also have our VEC guy make spaces with the Dynamo connector. And then we're going to send that out to Power BI and Power Automate to Teams and Excel. So with the Power Automate, they actually make it really easy with some templates to get started. And you can also make it really advanced if you wanted.

So yeah, here's our first little example. So if you do a little Google search, you can get to this actual Microsoft page. But then here's all the template examples of the template. So we're going to go ahead and look at the Microsoft Teams notification. So the idea of this one is, hey, if the architect updates their rooms, I'll get a notification in Teams. And be able to address that change and look at it.

And I think this can go a lot further. So here you can see I'm connected to those. So I'm good to go there. And it's pretty easy just filling out as long as everything looks good and connected. You can see it's just a dropdown of my hub, my folders. And then the actual folder that I'm looking for exchanges. And then I can go to my flow bot where I can pick a channel, set a message.

I don't think you need to put recipient. Maybe let's just do a channel that way you don't need a recipient. So again, a lot of different options in here to really customize what you want. And you can build on top of this layering different things. So we're going to go into the mechanical discipline one. We're going to say just general. So Teams channel, and then we can write a little message like, hey, architects updating those silly rooms again, right?

So here we have it inside of Teams, right? So in this one, zigma 24 folder. Those damn architects changed the rooms again. And then, of course, a fun little emoji just to add some emotion there. Make it fun. And this next one we got the Autodesk.

BRIAN NICKEL: What's really nice about these data connectors is just how easy they are to set up. So there's no programming really involved. It's just setting up basically routines based on your projects and your parameters.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, I'd kind of compare it to scripting, right?

BRIAN NICKEL: Yep, it's a lot like Dynamo scripting, just a little bit different. It's more setting up a flow or a workflow.

SEAN FRUIN: So here we have setting up some with the Excel. So getting our information into Excel. Maybe?

BRIAN NICKEL: There it goes.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so there it goes. A lot of different options here. Here we can start to say, hey, update rows. Make new rows. A lot of different options. Again, this is one of those ways that we could extract information and write it to a database. So there's a lot of options to do it in not just Excel, that's not really a great database. But you can also set up ones to do it in other databases.

So here we can see it on the right then updates coming in. Yeah, so again, endless possibilities. Really cool stuff. You can dig into the details a little bit more through the handout if you want to know exactly what to point and click at. So this one's new, new and this is the Power Automate workflow. The team is working on this right now I think to get it ready for AU And Out.

But this is really cool. So this is an example. I didn't put this one together. This is from the Dynamo Team. But here they're pulling in the geometry from that sample model, you can put color codings on it. So I'm really excited for this one for senior engineers. I see setting up standard templates or standard dashboards, right, that you could see pulling out the same stuff. So really cool stuff.

We were experimenting a little bit. So this is the energy model that I did. There's a whole class, by the way, about creating the energy models for the show and tower. So I'd check out that class if you're into that. But then once that's done, we can pull this in and let a senior engineer review it. So, again, so much cool stuff possible. And again, infinite possibilities. These are probably not even all the apps. It's all the ones that could possibly fit on the screen.

Yeah, I don't know, if you're an expert at Power Automate, it's pretty cool. Right, so again, outcomes of the ability to connect these. I think you could start to set up workflows to pull out a whole bunch of information from multiple projects. And then put that clean information, and you could have it clean through just View Templates and stuff, so you know exactly what you're pulling out, right? And we can start to pull out it a whole bunch of models, which is huge for the future of automation.

We can get that information to a senior engineer just through a dashboard. And then we saw that we can set up those notifications to have some collaboration between our architects and engineers. So if they make an update, at least we get notified, trigger the right people.

Our next workflow is all about the Revit and Inventor Workflow. So here we have Prefab Mechanical Plant Workflow. Brian, you want to hit on the problems here?

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, so on the problems here, essentially, we look at Revit as being the magnifying glass, and we look at Inventor being more of the microscope. So like microscopic level of detail versus higher level of detail or lower level of detail. In this picture, we've got the guy using the wrong tool to inflate the tire. He's trying to blow that tire up and it's the wrong tool.

And so this exercise is more or less understanding what is the right tool, and which tool we should be working with, and how we can connect to that. So one of the ways that we're communicating is that, oh, we can't get to the nuts and bolts inside of Revit like we can in Inventor. And so with these Data Connectors and these Data Exchanges, we can actually now leverage the Inventor model inside of our Revit model to where we can get a more fabricatable level of detail. And Sean's going to dive into the solution for this.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, of course, we've had that geometry problem where it can't be translated. Like I said, even with the geometry interoperability with Revit, and with Data Exchange, yes, we can now.

BRIAN NICKEL: We can actually communicate now. We have the swim lanes. So everything's in harmony.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so in this exploration, the idea is, hey, the mechanical engineer is going to have-- he has a mechanical plant. And we want to go to the fabricator to make some pre-fabricated solution, right? So we're going to send the boundary of the mechanical room and the incoming services, send that up to AECC. And then the contractor can pull that information in, do their m and then they can make the data exchange, so we can coordinate that back in.

The exact data flow kind of more detailed. So again, we make a view with just the walls and the incoming services that we want, make a data exchange, they consume that exchange inside of Inventor where you can see the walls. Pump our assembly in there, create that, send it back for coordination. So yeah, this is actually a pump I found on the internet. Again, I'm not an expert at Inventor. So bear with me a little bit.

But here we are making the Data Exchange. So with a 3D view I'm able to crop just to the stuff I want. You can see, I have those two incoming services. I go up to Collaborate, Data Exchange, Create my Data Exchange. Name it whatever you want. There's some abilities to put other filters in here, but we don't need to do that because we did that all through the 3D view itself.

So this does take a little bit of time to upload. I've actually sped this up a little bit too, just so we're not watching the wheel. But there we have it. We have our Data Exchange loaded. So now let's go to Inventor. So here in Inventor, we can start a new project by actually opening up a Data Exchange. If you got to Open down here, you can see Load Data Exchange.

Again, make sure your pre-checks are in. Do I have access to the Hub? Do I have access to all this stuff? Go down to there's my Mechanical Room. I'm going to load that into Inventor. And here we have that geometry from Revit in our Inventor. So now we know what we're constrained by. This is a pretty big constraint. We can also dive into the parameters and see some stuff that comes across from Revit. I believe on the Roadmap is to add more ability to do this more Data Exchange rather than a geometry exchange. I would say the Data Exchange right now is more focused on geometry than the granular parameter data.

BRIAN NICKEL: Think of this as the baseline of the initial set that they're offering us in terms of connections. And obviously, with this being in beta, some of the stuff is limited. But it will become more robust in time.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah and speaking of which, actually I don't have the exact video, I'll show you why in a second. But here we are adding some granular data through Inventor that would come across in Revit. I turned off the walls already, but we're able to get this pump in the location that it would fit in that room. It's actually a boiler assembly. Cool stuff there.

There were quite a bit of lessons learned here. So again, I didn't get all my ducks in a row before starting this, right? So I didn't have the interoperability tools there. So we got a frustrated duck, he's wandering on his own.

BRIAN NICKEL: We got an angry duck there.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, make sure your stuff's up. Don't get too many angry ducks. My trial actually ended, so the Inventor trial is pretty darn quick. So that was a problem. But I was told from an old chef that I worked with, there is no such thing as problems, only solutions. So I was able to go through a back door, right? So I used the Rhino Data Exchange to get this stuff back into Revit.

Another thing I learned with pulling everything into Inventor is units matter. So the units of this was in millimeters. You pull in inches, you can see that's not going to fit in that room. So yeah, gotta pay attention to those units. Also one of the times I did it, I actually pulled in 256 generic models. So again, this isn't ideal, right? This is actually the problem that we have when we try to go down to the nuts and bolts. So there's stuff you can do to make this one solid piece of geometry and you're not dealing with this.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah Revit doesn't like 256 components. It creates a lot of project bloat.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, it's really hard to move. I was trying to move it, too, and it did not want to move. This is actually the example from Autodesk where they just show this. I want to show this to show it's possible. I know I ran into some issues. But this is kind of their version. So here you can see the Data Exchange. I'll skip it a little bit. Yeah, this is all about fabricating a ladder, or a set of stairs, right?

BRIAN NICKEL: Staircase.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so then if we jump ahead a little bit, you can see that we can actually get this stuff into Revit, and you can start to see the parameters. So it's possible. I just kind of fell short. Do you want to cover the outcomes on this one, Brian?

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, so on the outcomes, once we get everything in a fluid state, like once we've got all of our Data Exchanges set up in the proper way that we want to send and receive data, it's kind of like operating a speedboat. It's very efficient. It's very fast. Number two, we can eliminate this telephone game or string and tin cans for communication. We can streamline the communication to where it's a direct data connection.

And then number three is that we have all the tools in the kitchen. So we've got multiple ovens for that, basically.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, all the pots and pans, all the--

BRIAN NICKEL: We've got everything organized

SEAN FRUIN: It's like we're working in a professional kitchen.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yep, we are working with a professional set of tools.

SEAN FRUIN: So our next one is about the Life Safety Dampers at Fire Rated Walls. Pretty easy workflow. Pretty straightforward. Find intersections of fire rated walls. So hey, architect, can I get this fire rated walls please? So what do they hit?

BRIAN NICKEL: Then we're suddenly in a Where's Waldo approach. And we didn't--

SEAN FRUIN: Literally like playing Where's Waldo.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, we didn't realize like-- if you've ever been through this experience, you know that looking for the fire rated walls is not always the easiest thing to do. You have to go through your project and dissect it.

SEAN FRUIN: I'm glad I was trained on this when I was in elementary school with Where's Waldo on how to find spot through a complicated floor plan and find those dashed lines.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah.

SEAN FRUIN: So that was fun.

BRIAN NICKEL: We're kind of bouncing down the slide and tumbling down the slide.

SEAN FRUIN: Well, this is the next way, right? So the next way is-- here, here's my whole Revit file. So it goes all right for a while. Brian just said, hey, you're in Dallas, too, right? So that slides also 105 degrees.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah.

SEAN FRUIN: So the analogy here if we dig a little bit deeper, the architect is doing all their work. They stuff it in a Revit model. That Revit model gets shared. It gets linked into an MEP model with a whole bunch of other models-- structural, electrical, blah, blah, blah. But then we have to dissect that model, I guess.

BRIAN NICKEL: Untangle it.

SEAN FRUIN: It's really complicated.

BRIAN NICKEL: You have to detangle it.

SEAN FRUIN: Yes, detangle it like the Christmas lights. This gets really complicated, with design options, phasing. At IMEG we're actually building a whole app just to deal with this problem. So yeah, there's got to be a better way, right?

BRIAN NICKEL: We saw in the beginning kind of like the spaghetti bowl, right? Just a tangled mess. And now we're kind of taking one piece of pasta or one strand of this process out and streamlining it. Because we want to go down a cool slide. We don't want to go down a bumpy slide.

SEAN FRUIN: A slide that my three-year-old can ride down.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so hey architect, give me fire-rated walls. Sure. Here you go through a Data Exchange. So that's the solution we're going to look at today. Pretty straightforward. They still do all their stuff in Revit, build their model, but then they have View Templates ready to go. So it's really easy to make a Data Exchange. That gets loaded up on AEC. We pull in our ducks. And then we're able to do a little Dynamo scripting to place those fire-rated walls.

So inside the model, you can see that we already have that stuff in there. So it's already color coded. We have our fire-rated walls ready to go. The information already there. We can go quickly create a Data Exchange with just this information. Again, same thing. Really easy. Go through that. And then the HVAC model.

BRIAN NICKEL: Oh here. I'll click it.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so we can open up Dynamo then within our HVAC model. Here's the Dynamo graph. So that part in gray would be a whole bunch of stuff pulling in links. Dynamo doesn't work great with links, right? Instead we can just say, hey, load Data Exchange. So again, this very familiar window that's keeping popping up everywhere will come up.

Here we can just, again, go down to our right thing. We have the Fire-rated Walls Data Exchange. We'll pull that in. Here's actually a nice thing where you deal with that units problem. So here we're in Revit, so it is feet. We're in American imperial units, right? So feet to feet. It does a little bit of thinking. But then you can see that the geometry comes.

There was some data cleanup I needed to do, actually. So something that's kind of weird about the Data Exchange right now is it pulls in some stuff that you wouldn't expect it to. So it pulls in the levels. So I did some cleaning up there. But then we can see with just a little bit of cleaning, we have all of our fire-rated walls. And hopefully, that just becomes a little bit easier with some iterations on these tools.

In the blue, we have actually collecting all the information. Just some Dynamo advice here I guess, I like building definitions now. And then output of a definition is a dictionary with all the information required to do this computation workflow. It's a really clean way. You can actually hide nulls and stuff.

If you want to look at the code down to the thing, actually I'll share this with the presentation files. But then you can see we have all the lines that generate it's the locations of the ducks, all our fire-rate walls. We find out where they intersect. And then we end up in this model putting I think like 12 dampers in where there's intersections between those fire-rated walls.

BRIAN NICKEL: And what's nice about this is once you've got the Dynamo script set up and saved, this is reusable. So Sean's gone in and actually set up all of the information required to where you've got steps 1 through 6. And now someone else can just go into that file and understand the logic of what that Dynamo script is doing, as well.

SEAN FRUIN: Will you do the next slide, Brian? I think I lost it.

BRIAN NICKEL: Oh yeah, sure.

SEAN FRUIN: Oh there we go. Yeah, so here's just, again, a still of it. So keep on going. So the outcomes of this, right?

BRIAN NICKEL: Actually I want to go back to this slide. Yeah, I want to go back to this slide for just one second because we kind of glossed over it real quick. What's kind of nice about this is once we get all of our data exchanges set up, we can sit back and smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey. Because now everything's all set up for us. Like we don't have to re-set up anything or deal with that tangled nightmare anymore. It's kind of creating a more assembly line approach with all of our data.

SEAN FRUIN: Right, cleaner data, better automation.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yep.

SEAN FRUIN: So for next one, this is kind of a fun example, this is the Generative Design Exchange. The goal here is to build a robot that can start to hit a hole in one using the Genetic Algorithm. So we'll dig in that. But really the problem comes from a story. So I'm not very good at golf. Last time I played golf, I had my friend's very expensive tapered driver and I hit the ground. And it went 50ft out into the-- it went farther than the ball. And I had to stop everybody and go get it. I've not held a golf club since.

So that was kind in the back of my mind. So then I go with Brian, right? And we're in line after built-- I don't know what year-- but we're at Disneyland enjoying our day together. And Brian's--

BRIAN NICKEL: It was July of '22. July of '22.

SEAN FRUIN: Exactly, July of '22. And he was like, hey, check out this really cool but top secret model that I got. And it was just really cool that you could see it on his phone. We ended up riding the ride. And nothing was said about it. But then I got invited and honored to speak here at Autodesk 2023. So I was like, hey dude, can I get that really top secret, cool Revit model that you--

BRIAN NICKEL: No, Sean. No, Sean. It's top secret. You're not allowed to use it.

SEAN FRUIN: No, I just want the I just want the tee and hole locations, Brian. We can do it with the Data Exchange.

BRIAN NICKEL: And I'm like, what's a Data Exchange? Like, I have no idea what this is. And so he sends me a link. Yeah, he sends me a link. And I go in and I explore it. And I realize, wow, I can actually share a model without actually sharing the model. He just he's just extracting data from my model, right? And was like, let me think about it. And then I went and looked at it. And I said, sure. You know what? You can Data Exchange and tap in and get the locations and some data from my top secret model. But you can't have my top secret model.

SEAN FRUIN: Right. So the data workflow here is Brian has his top secret Revit model. He was able to build a little Dynamo script to put his own families at the tee load and hole locations. Create a Data Exchange with that. Put it up on the cloud. I was able then to take that, consume it, and build this awesome fun little algorithm.

BRIAN NICKEL: Without stealing my top secret model, which was the best part.

SEAN FRUIN: So the whole idea here is we bring in that Data Exchange. There's also a cool extra bonus tip in here about sharing models. So if Generative Design, there's this data remember node. And it actually caches like geometry information inside the Dynamo script. So I was able to even get rid of the Data Exchange nodes. And all the information is stored inside this remember node.

And within that remember node, we have our tee locations and our hole locations. And then we have three variables-- the exit velocity, the club, which actually says what the angle that the ball is leaving at, and then the body rotation. Then really the math for this thing is just projectile motion. We measure the distance. And then there's a feedback loop that looks at that.

And what's really cool is it's actually like a 4D problem. So here's the demo. So we have the flag. Here's the flagpole, one of them in the Data Exchange. Viewer, again, on AECC. But then you can see we just have these data remember nodes where all that information was cached. Here we have our inputs. You can just go around and blindly guess what it is. You might get a good shot like this. You also might get a shot that looks like that chip at the beginning.

It's almost like a little bit of a video game, right? A little bit under Windows '95, but hey. So that one right there was the shot of-- or that one is the shot of the GIF.

BRIAN NICKEL: So Sean, so what you're essentially saying is once we get the mathematics correct I'll be able to shoot a hole in one.

SEAN FRUIN: Right. Yeah. We have that example, too, I think right here.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yep.

SEAN FRUIN: Yeah, so here we're going to create a Generative Design study. You can see, we pick our club. We pick our tee location, so one of 60 different locations. And it's going to adapt to that location in the hole that you send. Here we're creating the thing. We don't get very close on this one, but it's running through a whole bunch of iterations. I can see we're 87ft away.

So let's redo that with more generations, and see if we get a little bit closer. What I thought was really cool about this is the physics is like real, right? Because the geometry from your model is real. It was built in Revit to scale. So it just works. It's really cool in that sense. So I did here is you could do any type of computation by simply pulling out some of the information with the Data Exchange.

So here if we increase the population to even 20, let's do more generations and add a little bit more randomness to the seed. You can see that we get pretty close. I was surprised to see that we actually didn't nail it. But I think that's just the steps that the sliders are on. We can't find that perfect combination of exit velocity, angle, and rotation. So maybe if we were to make the steps a little bit smaller, it would actually converge on a hole in one. But, you know.

Yeah and then this is the random one doing a whole bunch. I will share that with you guys. So our outcomes here is we did get a bot that could start to hit a hole in one. A little bit more refinement would be great. Outcome number two is Brian was able to give me just the information he wanted to give, or could give because of IP reasons. So he was shielded from a wonderful lawsuit.

And then you guys, outcome number 3 is I'm able to share that workflow with you guys. So that's in the downloadable files if you want to play around with it. See if you can tinker with it to get a hole in one. Or just make it be a video game.

BRIAN NICKEL: And think just on a positive note, what was really nice about this example was just showing a fun way to use a Data Exchange using Dynamo. And a real world example of being able to protect your data from giving something that you didn't want to give to somebody.

SEAN FRUIN: Exactly. Those IP issues. One of the bummers here is the idea that you couldn't run this through the Dynamo player. So feedback to the team, that'd be really nice to do. So anybody can get in there and run something really easily. And this goes back to the fire damper example too, right? To make it just a little easier so no one has to-- some people get scared of the Dynamo.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, so now we're going to dive into-- I'm going to go back one slide because it just advanced-- this is explaining Revit Conduit to Fabrication with Allied BIM. So what we're seeing up here on the screen is a CNC tube bender. In our industry, for conduit, typically, we're dealing with hand vendors, electric benders, and a hydraulic benders for bending conduit. And that takes about 15 minutes to an hour and a half to run the mathematics and to get everything staged up in order to fabricate pipe work.

In this example, you can see that by connecting this machine we can now bend conduit in about 7 to 45 seconds. So as we step into this, we're going to recognize a problem. The problem goes back to the initial example that Sean showed where we've got this spaghetti nightmare of a mess of information. We've got the general contractor and the architect exchanging RFIs from plan sets, the models going through different disciplines, and there's no real clear trajectory or clear path out to the contractor, which costs a lot of money when we're building buildings.

We can connect it into an assembly line for tagging and then ultimately shipping out to the job site, as well. By creating a data flow example here, and getting the data into a usable format, Forge allows us to actually extract and dissect the model to provide instructions on how to build and fabricate this detail. So we kind of see this as a building information model going into a cloud information model, which we'll talk about a little bit further as we advance down.

This is an example of our software. So a user has taken basically an electrical model. They've published it into fabrication connected, which is our APS plug-in. They can dissect down into each of the assemblies. And we can see down in the lower right-hand corner that we're getting the total number of bends, the sizes, and the total lengths.

One of the problems inside of Revit is that conduits are broken out as conduit fittings and conduits. So there's two categories inside of Revit. However, when a fabricator is fabricating, there's really only one category. Am I taking a 10 foot stick or a 20 foot stick when I'm actually building this thing? And so what our software does is it takes the data from the model through the Data Exchange and through APS, it allows us to create a new category on top of the Revit model to where we can actually get the accurate lengths and counts for what we need to fabricate.