Export 3D Geometry to Power BI

Hello guys,

I watched a video and saw that people built some add-ins which can export Revit Geometry to Power BI. What kind of a transformation of geometry is needed to do this in Dynamo without these add-ins?

https://kg-dev.be/project/3dbi-for-revit/

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I guess that the geometry needs to be exprted as GLTF but the way is still ambiguous to me.

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Depending how much time you want to sink into this, I’d suggest checking out Tracer instead. It’s pretty cheap and perpetual as far as I can tell. 350 USD currently for R19-22. The developer (Nathan) is a top individual and I think might give you some leads as well potentially, but they put a lot of time into Tracer as far as I know - doubt it was easy.

To crack this using Dynamo you’ll need to write custom code to parse the objects into a format compatible with a 3D viewer, and build that 3D viewer component as well probably.

Someone asked this on PBI a long time ago also.

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Hi @Deniz_Maral ,

I noticed your link to 3DBI for Revit, which is a solution I developed and consists of 2 parts:

  1. The custom developed visual for Power BI: 3DBI, that is able to read .3dbi files.
  2. A custom addin for Revit (and there is one for SketchUp as well), that is able to export the geometry (+3d view camera locations) to a .3dbi file as well as all element properties to a .json file.

The short answer to your question is: no, you cannot do this with dynamo, you really need the addin + the custom viewer for Power BI. But, please feel free to give 3DBI a try and/or maybe even compare it with the other solution proposed in this thread. My first guess is that 3DBI probably took an equal amount of time to develop. If I as well am a top individual is harder to tell :slight_smile:

Other than that, I think that the viewer has a pretty good performance and comes with features such as:

  1. shadows
  2. controlling opacity of ghost objects (ghost objects are objects that fall out of the current query)
  3. static contextual objects: for example a site that is always visible, no matter the query.
  4. turning edges on or off for active objects, ghost objects or contextual objects

Here is an online example of a MEP file. Even though the viewer has currently been improved, I think the performance we had at the beginning was pretty good already:

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Hello Kenny,

thank you very much for your reply. Your Add-In looks amazing! I was just wondering what kind of geometry transformation is behind add-in. Some people told me that you can do it via Autodesk Forge, which can read .json files. Did you also use Forge? If yes, do the customers need to buy an account?

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We do not use forge. I noticed others do. All we do is grab the geometry (meshes) of all elements of the active 3D view and put it in a custom file with a .3dbi extension. It really is: what you see on the screen in Revit is what you get in Power BI.

EDIT: you do have an option though to use the model internal origin or the project base point as your origin in the .3dbi file.

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Thanks Gavin for your reply. I also watched your videos, that you created filled regions via Dynamo. It was a very good beginner stuff, if you want to do it manually. But these guys did a great job and you don’t need to take too much time on it.

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I will try your add-in for 14 days. It looks amazing! If we can manage to use in company, we will buy it, if it is not too expensive :slight_smile:

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Sounds great! If you have any questions or remarks, feel free to reach out or ask them here in public. I am very much open for feedback.

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This was my old workflow, my new one requires no filled regions/tracing but uses the illustrator package and edits an svg file directly. Having said that an app is always more direct and they are often worth the money if you use them regularly versus dynamo.

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Thanks Gavin, new videos are great!

Very nice but where is the 3D geometry here with a SVG file as output?:grin: Any free inventions to export and visualise the geometry in power bi?

After testing the Tracer plugin, I found that the mesh is exported as a text (data:model/gltf-binary;base64, encoded data) and stored in Sqlite database. I guess that to be able to export geometry and visualise it in Power BI, you need a python script that base 64 encodes mesh and load them to sqlite database.

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I forgot to mention that you will still need the tracer visual to be able to visualise your 3D in power BI.

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Thank you very much Yousra! Do you know how to convert the mesh to that format?

Unfortunately not yet. I have posted about that here Export to GLB and still waiting for a suggestion.

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@yousrakadcha78 have you also given 3DBI a try? You can download a version for Revit 2018 to 2022 here: https://www.kg-dev.be/project/3dbi-for-revit

As a bonus… it also exports the geometry and data of linked models. :slightly_smiling_face:

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No I didn’t. I’ll check the 15 days trial and keep you updated.

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Haha unfortunately it’s just 2D, the 3D process is much more difficult.

I tested the 3DBI plugin and immediately purchased once the trial expired. Awesome work on this! One of the biggest benefits is that this plugin writes the native and custom revit element metadata so you immediately have all the available fields to build relationships with other data sets…such as estimate/cost information and yard/field inventories. It’s a material coordinators dream come true! Current workflow is to push 2d estimate software through Dynamo converting instantly to 3d Revit, then to powerBI via this plugin, all in a matter of minutes.

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