Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Practical Use of Dynamo BIM - Updating Title Blocks






In this article I want to describe a very practical use of Dynamo BIM.

We often have a situation where we need to update titleblocks. It can be very time consuming to have somebody sit and update the Revision and Issue Status on a 100 drawing sheets. But it has to be done.

With 5 nodes in Dynamo we can make these changes in seconds. Here is our scenario. We have 100 drawing sheets in our Revit model. The issue status is currently Tender.


We need to change this to Construction on all 100 drawings. If it takes about 1 minute to change this manually on each drawing thats 100 minutes. We also run the risk of the modeller getting bored and going for a cup of coffee or mis-spelling on some of the sheets.
This is where Dynamo Bim is our best friend. I can write the program and have the whole job done in under 3 minutes. How mush time and money does that save.

all we have to do is place the nodes shown in the image below into your Dynamo BIM workspace.
 

Categories: This nodetells Revit to get the Sheet Category

All Elements of Category: This node selects all the sheets in the model.

These nodes are then wired together

Element.SetParameterByName: This  node is wired to the All Elements of Catagory node. It allows us tos pecifiy a parameter, in this case the parameter to change is Issue Status. 

Run the above code. All 100 drawing sheets are changed.


 
Dynamo BIM can be used for all those time consuming laborious tasks that we don’t like doing. Especially when the pressure is on and we have to get drawings issued.

Where can you learn more. Come along to one of our 1 day Dynamo BIM workshops.
These workshops are held regularly throughout Ireland,UK and ocassionally in the UAE. If you wish to find out more information, please feel free to contact us at info@siscin.ie

If you would like us to run a workshop in your area please contact us and we can organise a workshop.

If you have any questions on anything in this blog or any other blog please feel free to contact me at dan@siscin.ie. 

Dan Deery is the managing director of Siscín. Dan has over 20 years in the construction industry and has been using BIM since the mid 90’s. He also worked as a programmer for a CAD software company. Siscín  specialise in BIM Consultancy, Customisation, training,visualisation and animation for the Infrastructure, Engineering, Construction, Facilities and Architectural industries. Check out our Website www.siscin.ie
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10 comments:

  1. Unknown18 March 2016 at 05:03

    Hi Dan,

    This is really useful. Having a few offices at our company we run the office address as a generic annotation parameter, selected through a drop down menu. Any suggestions how to set this through Dynamo?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Siscín18 March 2016 at 05:40

    Hi Lee,

    Thank you for your comment. You can set this parameter the same way as above. In the string node just put in the name of the required parameter. Ensure that the text in the string is exactly the same as the parameter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown18 March 2016 at 08:55

    Thanks for the quick response. I've attempted to do that, as I assumed that would work. Doesn't appear to work. My address is a nested generic annotation which runs off a text file to find the latest office address.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Siscín18 March 2016 at 13:24

    You could try reading the information directly in from the external file

    ReplyDelete
  5. Arjan Peeters21 March 2016 at 11:27

    Why not an shared parameter on project information with status info?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Unknown31 March 2016 at 05:40

    This looks very useful! I am just beginning to look at Dynamo... Are these saved within Revit and can be used again?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Siscín31 March 2016 at 05:53

    These are saved as a file with an extewnsion of dyn. They can be used as often as needed

    ReplyDelete
  8. BIMSTER23 April 2016 at 15:30

    I've been using this methodology for a while. Though, don't need Dynamo. What we could use Dynamo for is to apply the status to drawings of a particular revision date ? The system I have now works great and is quick though you have to grab all the sheets you want to apply the status to. Dynamo could pick out those sheets for me ?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Siscín24 April 2016 at 12:36

    It definitley could. dynamo can add to your current work flow

    ReplyDelete
  10. scoot24 July 2019 at 22:07

    THANK YOU FOR THE INFORMATION
    PLEASE VISIT US
    BIM Implementation

    ReplyDelete

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