Using Revit and Dynamo to Do High LOD model for Rail Projects

PEGGY LIN: Hello, everyone. Let's get started. Me and Valentin are going to talk about using Revit Dynamo to do the high LOD model for rail projects. So we have three speakers. Hi. My name is Peggy Lin. I'm the BIM manager in AECOM Sydney civil infrastructure team. 15 years experience of civil infrastructure projects, including rail, roads, treatment plants, pumping station, pipelines, and all that.

I'm familiar with software like Revit, Civil 3D, Plant 3D, Inventor, Navisworks, Infraworks, and 12D. If you're coming from Australia and New Zealand area, you know what is 12D. Otherwise, maybe not.

Capable of doing programming in C#, Python, and Dynamo, and particularly interested in developing the workflow and the methodology that interact with data directly and try to increase the efficiency and the capabilities. Handover to Valentin.

VALENTIN BELETS: Hello, everyone. So essentially I'm a digital engineering specialist residing in Sydney civil infrastructure group. I started my career in 2011 after graduating from university back in Moscow, Russia, real specialization in bridges and tunneling structures.

I'm confident user of Civil 3D, Revit, Navisworks, Dynamo. And since my early years as a professional, I started using Autodesk University materials a lot. And it gave me a real boost in my career. So thanks, Autodesk, for that.

And also have the missing part of this presentation, Cesare, who couldn't come this time. But he's been here 10 times already during his career. And Peggy will talk a bit more about him.

PEGGY LIN: So for those of you who haven't heard of him, he regards himself as a computation design addict and being enthusiastic, having more than 10 years Revit model experience with Dynamo and been working on various project ranging from architecture to tunneling. So he's very diverse.

He's very proficient in Inventor, and Civil 3D, and RINA, which is more using architecture, I guess. And also having the program covers capacity using C#, Python, and Grasshopper. He also interesting about Revit workflow and improving efficiency of productivities.

So we still have another three class. Cesare will have another class tomorrow about automating modeling workflow for infrastructure, connecting Civil 3d and Revit for bridge and rail design. It will be a very interesting one.

I will present delivering a plant project utilizing AutoCAD, Plant 3D, Civil 3D, Revit, out with BIM 360 Teams and the Glue.

And Valentine will do a hands-on lab on the Dynamo for Civil 3D for civil infrastructure. Sorry for my spelling.

So today's agenda is going to talk about why we're using Revit Dynamo for infrastructure projects. We're gonna go through case study-- three different cases. And we will show-- depending on the time-- we will show a couple of examples. And we'll talk about how we're using Navisworks to check the designs.

So first, DE requirements. How much of you are coming from civil infrastructure background? OK.

So because we're coming from Australia. So nowadays we have a lot more requirement from the government in terms of higher BIM requirements where you been asked for a higher LOD models. And at the same time you're being asked for various data output like either COBie, even though it's not quite make sense for civil infrastructure project, but you get asked for it. Various schedule outputs. And we are also talking about we have to have everything has unique class 2015 tagged.

In house, we would like to have a workflow that reduce the time use during the whole design process and speed up the whole design, because the timeline for a typical project become shorter and shorter. And contractor demanding more models in a shorter time frame. So we try to achieve that in-house as well.

So why Revit? Everybody knows Revit has some limitations, especially if you're thinking from the civil structure point of view. One is a very limited model space. Everything you model you have 20 miles diameter from the internal origin of Revit. And anything outside of that, the model gets less accurate and less reliable.

Secondly, you have very limited input types that you can use. However, when we're doing the civil designs, we often get the data from either MX or from 12D, or from Civil 3D. Maybe something else as well, Jazz, for example. So it's very limited.

And the curving type in Revit itself is also limited. You are only dealing with six different geometry, which I put that in-- sorry. Whoops. I pulled that from the Revit documentation. So you've got lines, arcs, cylindrical helix, eclipse arcs, nerve splines, and hermit splines. So that's really limited curve that you can use.

But in the civil space there's a lot more. So there's the limitations.

But why we still use Revit? First, everybody knows Revit is parametric modeling tool. And it has a database. So I'm not going to spend too much time talking about database and parametric part of it.

What we really like about it is the way that it can managing the data in terms of facing. So this particular example, we have everything else in gray that is actually being built. And then we have the black one that is the new design-- the current face. And the red one we're showing as a future.

And this dash 1 means it's going to be removed and being moved to there. So it's pretty good in terms of we can showing various stage of design.

Dynamo extends the capacity of the Revit model by a few ways. So you could be able to export data, import data, create position geometry, create sections, create views, create sheets dynamically using Dynamo. So that's one of the reasons we going down to this path.

Now I'd like to talk about the design process that you often see in a typical projects traditionally. So you get the specification from clients to start with. And then your engineer will go ahead and process all these design requirements and come up with the engineering design solutions. And then they have a whole bunch of design data. Often engineer work in spreadsheets.

And then typically they will bring a paper, sketch everything down, and then they pass over these sketches to the drafters to create a drawing. So this is the typical process.

But in a civil infrastructure project, you have so many disciplines. So this is one discipline. And then when you have different disciplines, they do exactly the same thing. And potentially sometimes they're doing it isolated. Sometimes they're not. It really depending on your team as well.

And then after all this you have a whole set of the drawing created. And I remember one approach that I worked on is it's a 40-km highway project. And we had to have a room where we have a bunch of tables, and we laying down each discipline drawings on the tables. And each engineer-- the discipline engineer-- will go there and check each drawing and marking up in the drawings. Takes a long time. And often you have to wait until the drawing actually created, the engineer really understand what they really design a paper in the context.

So interdiscipline review happening in that stage. And then if anything goes, if you find issues, then you go back. And this circle goes again and again. We don't want that.

So we would like to do instead, when you get this data you go to create a model straightaway. For the [INAUDIBLE] design and a [INAUDIBLE] design, this is already the case most of the time. Before other things like a lot of miscellaneous structures might not be the case.

So we would like to have that happen. We would like to get the data, create a model straightaway, and then join becomes output. And I would like to have the interdisciplinary review happening in a model stage rather than the output stage. And that to shorten the whole process and make the interdisciplinary review a lot easier.

Now I would like to hand over to Valentin to talk about the setup process. So the first case is overarching structure. The goal when we started doing this, the goal is to be able to create something like this. So you could-- with a blank page and then using Dynamo, you create the whole lot of geometry in one go. So that's the goal that we wanted to have.

So the methodology that we go for is a bit like this. So we first understand the output requirements. And then we decided which kind of family we are actually using. And we define the parameters, and we create the families, design the input data sheet so engineer can do the input into it. And then we create the model from there and the scripting and producing the drawings and do the design checks.

First, this is actually the best markup that I've ever seen from one of the engineers. So this is one of our structural engineers. He actually went through making this PDF markup. And neatest one I've ever seen, to be honest.

In here he already did sort of getting some information from different engineers. So you can see that [INAUDIBLE] is coming from the rail engineer. That is from the structural engineer. This is from the overriding structural engineer. These bit from overriding structural engineer as well.

Overwire designer. He actually go ahead and calculate all these dimensions for us. The reason of that is in the typical traditional 2D process, you have to keep the drafter [INAUDIBLE] all of this information. And he had to go ahead and talk to different engineer at various occasions to actually be able to construct this sketch for us.

So I want to get rid of that as well. So what we do first is we study the geometry of the whole overriding structure system. So basically you have mast, anchor, cantilever MAST, and portal, and a job post.

And then if you further go ahead to study this geometry, you know, they all build a different stage. So you have the footing. Footing will be built first. And then you have mast being built for depending whatever is needed. And the job per gets put on later, bridge later. And anchor is a separate geometry.

So after we understand the geometry, you understand this is something that you need to build. Then we define the parameters. How do we do that? We're looking at the traditional drawings. You basically would look at-- I want to try those data from the model.

So when this data I'll be giving by [INAUDIBLE] structural engineer, this is coming from geotech engineer. Rail engineer, this should be a dynamic output once this is positioned. This is coming from structural engineer. This is coming from geotech engineer, I believe.

And you also want to have all this labeled dynamically based on the geometry rather than you go ahead do it anyway. So we understand that. So then after that, we decided the spreadsheet-- actually it's family first.

So this is the example of one of the mass families. So it's very basic by looking at it. Firstly, you have [INAUDIBLE] out. The way that we construct this is we understand all of the overlying structure-- most elements in the rail design is based on what we call high rail aisle.

So the way that I just designed it is actually using a parameter to draw the height of this structure in the space, rather than using offset. The advantage of this is in making the labeling process, and also the changing level process later on, a lot easier.

And then we have whole bunch of, as you can see, they're all instant parameter. The reason we use instant parameter is then we can using Dynamo to actually read the writing the data into it, because they're all different. They're all individual instance in the model.

And these are the type parameter, because if you look at here, this is one of the type of the mast based on after we studied the client standard. So this is the way they call it. And they set the geometry requirement that I have.

And this is actually the drawing reference that we want to referring to. OK.

So once I have that and also I understand the parameter output, this is the actual input data sheet that we designed. So we get the overall structure engineer to give us this information, structural engineer to do this bit of information, structural engineer to do-- no. This is the wire structure, overlying structural engineer. And then this is the coming from the geotech engineer. So I put them in a comment [INAUDIBLE] and asked them to do all the inputs in here.

Then we built the script. So this script has input in here and the input is basically that spreadsheet and also the line work that we input it from the civil design. And then this bit is to understand the project coordinate system that we set up for that particular drawing and the model. This bit is to extract the data from the Excel sheets.

And then we have this section here to actually check the overlying structure is already placed or not. So if we have new elements in the spreadsheet, we won't replace it. We've just updated geometry.

And this is the update. This is the bits that actually updates the parameters being etched family items. The green parts are the calculation of the data. And so this portion will create the new structure if it's not already placed.

So then after that we come to the joint production bits. And you can see this is the actual model created. Remember, each object are actually individual, so we will be able to apply different staging color to it. So when you see the-- I can't remember exactly. I seen that yellow one is stage 1. And green one is the stage 2. And we have blue one is stage 3. And you can see the job output actually plays in different stage as well.

And this is the output of the drawing. So this is completely dynamic from the Revit. So when models update, this updates as well. We also have the schedule coming out from the model directly.

OK. I want to hand over to Valentin to do his second case.

VALENTIN BELETS: So this task was given to me by Peggy to model [INAUDIBLE] so-called for that project. And essentially the process is that using Dynamo, I processed Excel spreadsheet. I'll put it from the Siebel design software called 12D.

And based on two Revit components, one of them is the level-based and another one is the adaptive component. The [INAUDIBLE] wall was modeled.

This is an overview of Dynamo script. And bit of a demonstration of what's been done. Dynamo script grabs data, takes the over to the next three columns, then establishes shared coordinates as per the project.

Then it does the processing of all this information, determines how the panels should be placed based on the previous post height or the next post height. And it also produces a long section simultaneously with the 3D one, and puts all the calculated parameters into the family components.

So this [INAUDIBLE] is about creating-- about reading the information from the Excel spreadsheet. File number xy and z values, and as well as the final height. Then the points are created. And based on those points the components are placed.

So the top part is only to calculate distance between the previous post and the next one. And then it produces the long section based on the same geometry input.

So once that's done and the old information is processed, we are in to place the components themselves and write all the parameters. Here we are. All the posts are placed and rotated on an angle average between the previous panel and the next panel to fit both of them.

So in this Dynamo script now custom nodes are used. Just a couple of them are written in Python to calculate the angle, and then also to calculate the long section position of each post.

Components are modeled in different level of details. So you can see that works nicely. And if needed to, we can later on after all the download scripting is done, we can modify, keeps it running, modify Excel spreadsheet and change the set out if needed.

So based on the maximum panel height, it splits the panel into several ones. And also based on the minimum height, when the railing should be applied, it puts the railing component on top of the wall.

In the recording I skipped the processing part, which takes about maybe 2 minutes to redefine the height and the area of the components.

But basically it's [INAUDIBLE] thing. But originally if you want to redo the set out of all the posts and of the wall, you essentially need to go back to the Civil design software where all the context is clearly visible, or the reference files or utilities or whatever. And then do it there, because it takes too much time and effort to bring the context either inside Dynamo or even inside Revit, especially when we are talking about underground utilities or stuff like that.

And then the next part is that these two type parameters, once it's all placed, and let's say an engineer decides that it actually railing minimum height when the railing is applied is less or more, and panel height maximum is different. We can quickly change it, and all the model changes accordingly.

So that's it for the [INAUDIBLE] wall model. And hand it over to Peggy.

PEGGY LIN: So for piling wall we have this design requirements. The piling diameter, and also the center-to-center distance will be varied based on the returning height. Then the capping beam size will be very based on this actual size of the piles. And we get the control string from the civil design softwares.

So what we do is initially we create these gigantic scripts. And we get input. So this is purely a [INAUDIBLE] string. So we get a top string and a bottom string, which is the top of the piling wall and the bottom of the returning height.

So if you go back to this page. So we get a string over there. And we get a string down there. So we know the higher difference.

And this bit does all sorts of calculations. And then that bit we create families. So the first one on the top creates all the piles.

And this design, all the calculations here calculates the returning [INAUDIBLE] and then applies the requirement of like, say for example, between returning height between 1 meter to 2 meter, it has to be center to center 2 meters and diameter 900, for example. Or 2 meter to 3 meter has to be 3 meter in center to center distance, and 1.2 meters in diameter of the power, for example. And the calculation would take that into consideration and put the right size and right distance of the power in position.

This power and this power actually calculates the shock rates between the piles. So when the pile position difference, you get a different shock rate.

Then this bit creates the capping beam on the top. Again, when you have a bigger pile diameter, then your capping beam has to be wider. In this part we put on the hand rails.

However, and that's in the concept stage and running into this challenge. We were told by engineer that in the interface we want exactly 400 mills from the edge of the wall. And that's one thing.

The other thing is, because we had to construct this override structure first, and we can't change it, we can't-- so once you have the overriding structure there, you can't really piling them at all. So you have to have a gap.

Of course, you can program the Dynamo to actually do that. But it takes-- every time you change the situation, you're going to have to do rescripting. And that's too much work.

So we end come up with this stepped approach. So when we do the concept design, that's what you see in the first gigantic script. And then when we progress in the detailed design, we output all the power location into 2D. We exported the data as a spreadsheet, and then creates in using the Civil 3D as a [INAUDIBLE] point. And we're importing them back into the CAD typical classical CAD environment.

Reposition all the piles, move them around until engineer's happy about it. And then we bring it back to Dynamo, recalculate, reload the power position, recalculate top and bottom of the pile. And after that, we then recalculate all the shock rates creates it. Capping beams and hand rails.

And the last bit is when we actually had a step that we changed the measure of how we-- the depths of the pile by firstly when we start, the engineer said, the piling depths has to be-- if the returning height is 3 meters, it has to be 1.5 meter-- 1.5 times of the returning high, or three times. But in the end, we have to consider the construction usability. And we have to make sure the piling has like, a couple of pile in the same desk rather than they all varies depending on the retaining height, just because in the actual construction site, it's very difficult to actually find all the cages in different [INAUDIBLE] and put in the right position. Make construction a lot harder. So we have to level it out.

So we do that calculation in a spreadsheet, again, and then bring it back to the Dynamo. And then load it back again. So that's the final approach. That is the result that we have.

So you can see that the piling is actually level out to five to six different piles. And the size of that is varies and distances varies. And where we have this other structure we have a gap in there. And that is the shock rate, capping beam and hand rail. OK.

A couple other examples. This is the fencing model that we do. And we come up with-- this is actually the work done by Cesare. And we did this-- we have this-- the scripts starting to calculate, take the string from the civil input again, and recalculates the position of the post based on the maximum spacing that we are giving and base.

And we can also change the panel heights, panel lines. And you can see on the back there's a red post. That is actually showing control point of where you're getting from the civil inputs.

But when you do your first calculation in the Dynamo, you actually get these points, rather than taking that. So we can change the point tolerance and actually cater and make sure the string is running through those control point rather than escaping it.

We also use Dynamo to actually create the kinematic envelope of the rail. So we can actually do the clearance check later on. But I show you that later.

This is an interesting one. We replicate entire journey to design model in Revit. In Australia we often use 12D for the journey to design.

At the beginning of the project, I would like to just bring this geometry into Revit by using CAD import. And it doesn't work well. Obviously it doesn't work well just for this piece of geometry, for whatever reason.

So we have not decided to do using Dynamo. So we dump the data out, which is a gigantic spreadsheet from the 12D. And we use the Dynamo to recreate the entire drainage network. So the pipe is the adaptive family is the generic pit family. So this is the couple example.

Now I'd like to show you what we did when we're using-- we actually use Navisworks to do the design check. In the typical rail design situation, you were given by your authority design requirements, in this document it specify all the requirement terms of the clearance from the track to various structures.

In order to actually do this check using Navisworks, we actually have to have a geometry created. So we created on the left is the kinematic envelope that you can see. And this is all the clearance envelope that we do. So, I use different color to highlight the different clearance check in the previous tables.

Assuming you guys use Navisworks. Yeah. So when we started the project, we cleared a whole bunch of search set based on the disciplines and the structures and whatever. So once you have that set, then you can create rules of the clash detection check.

So we are able to run all the clearance check based on the room by say, for example, this one is two 150 offset to the structure and the footings. So things like that. So that's one thing.

And we just run this through the life of the project and to make sure it's correct.

The other thing that we try to do is-- Navisworks has this trouble of if you try to position a viewpoint in the particular point, it's really, really difficult. It's probably working well with the buildings, because it's all square and nice.

But for the civil project, it's not that easy. So we created this tool. We can load in all the alignment data, and then create the whole set of alignment-- sorry-- create a whole set of view points. And then we can create these animations.

And because they're all viewpoints, you can stop anywhere. You can click on, say, for example, [INAUDIBLE] number 1150. Then you can go there and actually see it. This is just a picture, so it keeps playing.

And this can be used through the life of the project. And we find it very useful.

At the same time, that creates the plan view as well. We were able to just go to a particular point and look at it.

So we start. I'm finished. Any questions?

AUDIENCE: Are you going to be posting your slides?

PEGGY LIN: Yes, I will.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Say that again? Sorry.

AUDIENCE: How far?

PEGGY LIN: How far. This particular project, it's one kilometer only because it's a-- the complexity of this project is actually not about how long it is. It's about how many staging we have to handle. So it gets really complicated, cause even when we're doing the cost reduction, we have to do multiple stages because it's just very complicated that way. Yes?

AUDIENCE: You're over his team [INAUDIBLE] in 3D [INAUDIBLE].

PEGGY LIN: This is the first project we do 3D.

Any other question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Sometimes the center line is not easy [INAUDIBLE] if you go-- wherever you go from the center to [INAUDIBLE], you have to another [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Are you talking about the Navisworks [INAUDIBLE]? Or--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Navisworks or [INAUDIBLE].

PEGGY LIN: Ah. We mainly relied on the design string from the Civil software. Revit doesn't do any of the design on the civil string at all. We're taking the input from the-- in this case, 12D.

Yes.

AUDIENCE: So for the [INAUDIBLE] for the linear, did you guys do through Dynamo scripting like the [INAUDIBLE] Or do you just take the status envelope and run it through? Or did you just do it based off of the [INAUDIBLE]?

PEGGY LIN: In this case we do based on the post situation-- one for kinematic envelope, because kinematic envelope is the most critical one. And then we also run through the clearance check through this [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Yes.

AUDIENCE: When you inspected [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] How did you break up [INAUDIBLE]? Like, did you just [INAUDIBLE] or what? What did you use [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: For the case of the retaining wall, it's taking base from all the point. Because it is interesting, because the retaining wall itself is not entirely curving. It varies from horizontal and also vertical, but it's not curving like a track.

So most of them are straight and having a little bit of basic curve. So Revit can handle that. If you're asking for the rail, we actually generate that in 12D this time.

AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.

PEGGY LIN: Yeah. And I understand they're doing it-- the way they're doing is pretty much similar as the Revit as well. Because it just taking the sample of the points. And I believe it's somewhere about 200 mil. The point in sample is about 200 mil. That's my understanding.

What's your question?

AUDIENCE: What type of data can you input from Revit that [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: We do couple of different one, actually. We sometimes use Excel. So we get the data from the string as the Excel output as Excel. Sometimes we bring the cat string into Revit, import into Revit, and do it from there. Yeah.

Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: For the overall structure, we are actually using the-- we have the client stand-up that we have to follow. So we actually put in the standard joint numbers from the client specification in the families. So we can refer back.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: No. Revit Family is not publicly available. But the standard drawing is. Standard drawing is available on the website. Yeah. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: We do it in 1 meter.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Yeah. So that way you can get the report based on major challenges.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Yes. From the alignment. So similar like you design [INAUDIBLE]. You just create this amyloid through the alignment.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Yes. In this case, we actually use Civil 3D for that particular one. But you can also do Dynamo in taking the point and sweep it. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

But this case, we actually use real 3D.

AUDIENCE: OK. [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Sorry, what was your question?

AUDIENCE: The construction what you makes on Dynamo, [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: We export it as [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah. Any more questions?

AUDIENCE: What about the [INAUDIBLE]? I think the biggest advantage that you had is when you passed this model [INAUDIBLE] or when you pointed out that the construction and [INAUDIBLE] fees. It means then you would [INAUDIBLE] a lot of advantage to use the model. So and it makes sense that if you [INAUDIBLE] the model is open. So that you [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PEGGY LIN: Oh.

AUDIENCE: And also for the [INAUDIBLE] so that they can use it for [INAUDIBLE].

PEGGY LIN: Well, for this case we hand over the model to the construction company every two weeks as a progress. And then it actually didn't go to the asset manager phase, just because our client wasn't really ready for it.

But it can be. Because we are actually updating the-- because this is a live project that's still-- we sort of design as we-- design as they construct it. So we had to update some of the data as a bill as well. So we did that, but not yet for the asset management, I should say. Yeah. I would like to, but they're not ready.

Any other questions? OK. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]