Tunnel and Infrastructure Modeling with Dynamo and Revit

THORBJORN ANDERSSON: Good afternoon, people. I'm Thorbjorn Andersson from Norway. I work at a company called [INAUDIBLE]. I'm here to present tunnel and infrastructure modeling with Dynamo and Revit. So a bit about the obligatory first. Norconsult, we're the largest leading multidisciplinary consultancy company in Norway. We have offices all around the world mostly and work within, say, most of the-- everything from construction to infrastructure and environments. I'm going to be talking a bit about a project of ours, called Rogfast, and focusing mostly what we've done there.

And Rogfast is actually during the design phase at the moment. When complete, it will be the world's deepest and longest subzero tunnel, 27 kilometers long and 390 meters below sea level at its deepest point. The project owner is the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, and it's located outside of [INAUDIBLE] in Norway, in the communities of Bokn, Kvitsoy, on Randaberg. It's an estimated project cost of around $16.5 billion NOX.

And to give you a bit of overview about the project, I think we'll run of an information movie from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration illustrating the project. So basically, this is actually what got us started with Dynamo and Revit with infrastructure. This is one of our largest projects, and it's also one of the definitely largest infrastructure projects in Norway. We started the detailed design phase of this round two years ago in January last year, and we're going to start detailed design and modeling, of course. So the big question, at the moment, was how we were going to do it?

When you have a large project, such as this, with a 27-kilometer-long two-tube tunnel-- let's see. Yeah, it's a massive scale. For instance, we have three places with the ventilation shafts up to 250 meters deep. For every 250 meters there, we have eight exits between the tunnels. We have the technical buildings for every 1 and 1/2 kilometers in both tunnels, and for every 125 meters there's an emergency kiosk like that. And around the middle, we have an exit tunnel up to the island of Kvitsoy, and below there is a actually a two-level intersection with two roundabouts 290 meters below sea level. So that's kind of crazy.

This is the challenge facing us two years ago. We're going to start modeling this basically. For the tunnel profile itself, the thing that [INAUDIBLE]-- we have decided that we're going to use Gemini, and for the road design itself we use Nova Points, but for the structures and technical installations, everything, we haven't decided on a software. So this is an overview of the area between Kvitsoy. Here, you have the roundabouts and access tunnel, and this is the ventilation system-- one of three locations where we have shafts up to the surface to ventilate the two tunnels. And the exit tunnel up to Kvitsoy is around four-kilometers long, so basically we have around 60 kilometers of tunnels in this project.

From Kvitsoy, it continuous up to the community of Bokn, and it crosses the deepest point there at 390 meters below sea level. So that gives you a quick overview of the project. Basically, we have hundreds of structures-- like, 600, 700 of them. We have thousands of installations. And we needed a software, something to automate our work, because doing this, modeling this, tunnel manually, that would be lunacy basically, because you'd spend two years just modeling it once. And if something changes, you're screwed, because you'd spend another two years updating the model. So the project will start construction somewhere around in next year and will be built until 2025, 2026, so we're still eight years away from completion around that.

This is the [INAUDIBLE], the most complicated one project. So why we started with Revit and Dynamo? Because up until then, at least in Norway, it was usually CAD-based products that was used within infrastructure like AutoCAD with Nova Points, and the problem with that is they're too manual. And of course, if you want to deliver BIM, you want to do that without AutoCAD.

So we have the different departments around us, energy, at our firm. We use Dynamo within different projects. They tipped us that this could be a good idea, so we started looking into it and actually found out that we could automate a lot of the modeling if we switched to Revit with Dynamo. So how to begin with infrastructure modeling in Revit and Dynamo? First of all, the first challenge is actually getting the road body into the program. Yeah. Yeah, of course, the main challenges of infrastructure projects is that there are no plane levels to model structures or place objects.

You have alignments of the road, which means that you always have a tilted surface, which means that technical installations, they need to be tilted round all free access. Structures need to have the curvatures along the road, which means that you have a lot of complicated structures. Yeah, a complicated situation. This is a standard profile from a common tunnel in Norway. As you can see here, this profile is always tilted on the road surface, and you'll usually have a cross-sectional slope here. Yeah, of course, we also have very large-spanning models, which can be very hard to handle. For instance here, if you want to manually move from one side of the project to another, you're moving 27 kilometers, so that takes a while.

So with Dynamo, you have a way to automate your work processes and a way to handle complicated geometry. Basically, Dynamo can do everything Revit can't. Because even using Revit within infrastructure projects, well, it's not easy, basically because there are no easy ways to get a road geometry into it. And there are no easy ways to model complicated geometry. So first of all, when you want to get a road geometry into Dynamo, you have several options.

I'd say you've perhaps seen one of them, presented by, like, Deiter from [INAUDIBLE], from Autodesk, with corridor points from Civil 3D. It's one way you can use the physical polycurves from the road designing software. There are advantages and disadvantages of both of the methods, but I'd say that, personally, it comes down to data processing. Because I'd say that either you're using coordinates, or polycurves, or whatever you decide to use for the road geometry. It basically boils down to what takes the shortest amount of time to use for your type of projects.

So for instance, we started off with using, like, coordinates files at low cost, but the problem was the [INAUDIBLE] coordinate files for 60 kilometers of tunnels, you have massive amounts of data. And that data takes a long time to process, and that's why we actually switched to polycurves, because Dynamo can process them a lot faster. So I thought I'd just show a bit of a demonstration video. I'll actually focus most of the presentation around videos showing how we use Dynamo. So this is one of the scripts we have for placing objects in a tunnel. We've loaded the road geometry into Dynamo, or Revit, and we're using Excel as a tool of creating the data, telling Dynamo where to place the objects. We just say that on change number 20,000, for instance, on the right side, I want a concrete element. It goes into it, locates the concrete, calculates the position. Let's see if I can post this.

So in advance there, we've prepared the locations of the concrete elements in this model and basically just ran it into Dynamo to place them. This is just a 1/2 kilometers of concrete elements. So we, basically, here, Dynamo, you just tell-- for instance, on change number 15,000, there might be an emergency lay-by, so Dynamo automatically accounts for it. It finds that, OK, in this position, I need to offset the elements farther. I need to change the rotating angle of the elements and position it accordingly.

And in this way, you can actually model up a tunnel pretty quickly. Automatically, you can have a fully operational Revit model fast. What takes time is basically kind of furnishing the tunnel in advance, because kind of finding out where all the elements are positioned in the tunnel-- for instance, where all the signs are, where all the concrete elements are, or where the structures are-- and feeding the data-- of preparing the data to load into Dynamo. So for instance, we want door openings in the concrete elements here. We can just load in the file. That says, on these change numbers, I want a door, or in this case for Revit there will be a-- yeah, opening cuts. Thank you.

Yeah, an opening cuts. So it places the opening cuts at the correct position. It finds the corresponding concrete elements and cuts them against each other automatically, and basically that's what it could do for the rest of the technical installations and everything. You hand it a position, you'd say unchanged number, at the side of the tunnel. And either you use these-- kind of the road geometry-- to actually automatically calculate where it should be in the tunnel profile, or you can specify that on the 3 meters to the side of the central line and two meters up I want a site.

And the big advantage of this, with Revit especially, it has a database itself, which means that every element in the mobile has a unique element ID. And as long as you keep the element ID, and you keep a database or something, a spreadsheet, that you know that every element in the model and know the element ID, so you can actually run changes to the model automatically by just saying that's OK-- for instance, these elements, I want them on a new position like this. I've just taken, say, a section here. I say that, these concrete elements here, I want them moved to the other side of the tunnel. So I just put that into a spreadsheet and say that, OK, I want these moved. And I switch the tunnel in the Dynamo script, and it automatically loads in the road geometry, calculates the position, and moves the elements. So basically, you can automate away most of this modeling.

Yes, database integration. I'd say that for a large infrastructure project, a database for keeping overview of every technical installation of every structure and everything you have in your tunnel is actually essential, because using, like, sheets in Revit or in something, that's actually too hard. So if you want to know, for instance, where all the signs are in the tunnel, I'd recommend using a database to keep overview, because you have, like, a low-threshold place where people can go in and find the information they need. We use, actually, an external access database to log everything we have in our projects.

And that's the data from the database we feed into Dynamo, and it generates models based on what we have in here. So basically, that's just the position of the objects and everything. So the element IDs, for instance, we write them back into the database, so that we can update the model at the later points. Yeah, so the process of updating a model, instead of actually going into a model manually-like moving around objects and modeling structures, we go into the database. We update the information there. We take it out to a spreadsheet, which is kind of the link between the database and the model, and we run changes the model via Dynamo.

So for instance, for all the structures in our projects, we have, like, 47 technical buildings, and pump stations, and 470 kiosks. And they're all in separate Revit models, but they're all identical. So to place them, we basically just say that on certain changes numbers I want a structure. Dynamo, again, reads the data, calculates the position, and then positions the objects. So for instance, this is all the technical buildings along one of the tunnels, at the low cost, around 20 of them. It takes a minute, seconds even, to calculate and position all these structures.

So basically, we built up these scripts. We use it on the tunnel projects. For instance there, if you want to place something on a certain project, you just go into the script. You type in which project you're working on, which road alignments you work on, and it's automatically goes on our servers to find the correct files and does the calculations. And as I've mentioned before, we always say take the element IDs back into our database, so that we can update the model at a later point.

As you can see here, for instance. At the side of the tunnel, you always have, like, a concrete side area. You have a concrete element, and the structure has to be positioned [INAUDIBLE] behind the concrete elements, so with Dynamo you can actually model up the exact situation to find the correct position of the structure and automatically do that for every single situation. And it's on [INAUDIBLE] as you can see here. And this is an interesting point, because here [INAUDIBLE], we have 109 emergency exits-- a cross passage between the two tunnels-- and the challenge with structures like that is that they all contain the same components.

You have, like, concrete structures. You have some cable trays, conduits, and stuff like that. But because the alignments of the two tunnels don't follow each other exactly-- they have various heights. You have different lengths within the tunnels-- you need some way to automate the modeling of the structures between the tunnels. So I'm going to quickly show you how we do that.

First of all, we start off by just locating and placing the objects elements connected to the two tunnels separately just like this. Basically, it just calculates every position of every single element in the zone. It places both for the doors. It places both a door and a void element, so that we can use to [INAUDIBLE] later. So yeah, basically here, we like working on-- we worked actually on one tunnel at a time, and that's mostly because of the amount of data you need to cover the entire tunnel system. A Dynamo uses significantly shorter time to process 27 kilometers of data, rather than 60, of course. So we split it into-- you always work on one road at a time. So there, we have the structures and all the components connected to each tunnel, and for the concrete slabs itself and the gravel between the two tunnels, which is kind of funny, because with Dynamo you can't actually model a concrete floor and add a slope to it, as far as I've found out, at least.

But you can model a slab, add a slope to that one, and manipulate that with Dynamo. So to model the concrete slabs, you just model up one at the beginning. Add a slope to it and say where you want this connected to each of the two tunnels. And basically, it automatically models up all of the concrete slabs accurately between the two tunnels, so within, like, 10 minutes actually, you can model up all 109 cross passages in this project with Dynamo, as long as you created these lists in advance of what components are going to be placed where. And that saves us for, like, a lot of time, because if we were going to do this manually you'd be sitting there for weeks probably just trying to find out where the concrete slabs are supposed to be.

The height at each tunnel, that's a hopeless job. It takes forever, but Dynamo can actually process that in seconds. So I think it took, like, 10 to 15 minutes from when we began this to, actually, all the 109 cross passages was a-- basically, you can do this with whatever you'd need in there-- for instance, a cable trace, conduits. As long as you can calculate the position of the structure connected to each tunnel, you can calculate the position of anything in there. So we'll just finish off the last one here with adding the cable trace. Let me skip ahead a bit.

The curvature you see there is just a preview of the geometry. Basically, that's where I want the-- I told Dynamo to place the cable trace. You run the scripts, and it automatically models up the tracing of all 109 cross passages, basically, in a minute or two. So this is actually pretty effective.

When it comes to modeling structures aligned with the road, I thought I'd use-- this is actually one of my favorite examples. For instance, this is a sketch we got from the architect. When you have the long tunnel, such as this [INAUDIBLE], you kind of need something in the tunnel that breaks up the monotony of all these concrete elements. If you, like, tens of thousands of concrete elements, your drivers tend to get sleepy when they drive for it, so we have an architect at a different firm who designed something here. So this is a sketch we got from the architect. This is what she wanted.

So I sat down with this, scratching my head, and thinking, OK, what the hell am I looking at, basically. Because yeah, it's not always easy to understand these architects, to put it mildly. So this structure here ended up with these bloated scripts for MyLib, because we had scheduled a meeting with the architect and a couple of senior people at the firm for a day. And we were supposed to sit down, and go through this design, and test different versions of it. And that's kind of challenging, because the only way you can actually sit down in a meeting and test different designs, you need a parametric designer. And that's where Dynamo comes in. See there.

So basically, what we did-- the day before the meeting, we tried actually figuring out what can the architect come up with, of changes. We created parameters for everything there, from the width of these slopes up there to the slope up from the asphalt, and ended up with this. You can see down here in the right corner. And modeled up with Dynamo, it looks something like this. And this is kind of cool, because if you have the road geometry in Dynamo, you can basically do whatever you want.

So in this case, you just define a profile, and say that, OK, from this change number to this change number I want this profile. And you just add parameters. Like, add the model of the asphalt, then create some planes, some curves, and basically create pretty complicated geometry with this and take it into Revit. So with Dynamo, we actually had got the opportunity just sit in a meeting, test different designs, take it into Navisworks, check how does this actually look. So we actually, in the two hours, agreed upon a design, which I'd say is a kind of record.

Usually, you create a design. You model up something. You send it to the architect. You get some feedback, your comments, and you change something. And you send it back, and there's a lot of back and forth there. And this is the end results, and this is actually the design we were going for. It's kind of a lighting to break up the monotonous design of concrete elements. We ended up eventually rejecting the design, because the lighting didn't give the exact effect. So we tested this in 3DS Max, and it didn't work out.

So this is a rendering of the Revit model of the [INAUDIBLE]-- or parts of it, at least. You can see all of the technical installations there. You have structures, concrete elements, everything there is modeled-- everything except the MEP here. That's from Gemini. This is the clip of the Navisworks model of the intersection below Kvitsoy, where you can see all the cross passages. You can see some technical buildings there. These are the ventilation shots. So basically, we model up most of the installations and the structures with Revit and Dynamo. The MEP is from a different software mostly because it's-- well, you can do it with Dynamo, but I'd say we have better software for handling that.

This is also a quick overview for everything-- from signs, cable trace, and conduits. The conduits, up to the roof of the tunnel, we take those in Dynamo, but the conduits in the longitudinal direction we do with different software. So are there are any questions?