Revit & Dynamo - Python & Pandas

Recently I have been learning how to play with pandas and trying to improve my skills with python, recently working on a project I decide to try to implement some of the knowledge I have acquired along my years of experience.

I always think how can we make things faster and get quick analysis for a project allowing to get a better idea of the Life Cycle Assessment of a project as soon as possible, with the purpose to get the correct path and direction for a project.

First let me share a bit of context, we are working with a client for landscape architecture, so the intention first was to analyze the land itself and get a better idea of the context. By using Revit and Dynamo we were able to transform geometry into polygons and actually inject data and materials to understand the way in behave in a really easy way. 

With this behavior we can identify clearly what are we dealing with, but only in a visual level, so this is where we jump out of Revit and Dynamo and we go to Python and Pandas.

One of the things I have realize along my career is how important information is to build a project that will be suitable of calling it “sustainable” and in some way sustainability is actually a measure, otherwise we cannot create such a project. 

Python & Pandas

Here is where a data set become more interesting to work with all the information generated to create the models for this mapping has more utility and better ideas to analyze what’s happening in a project. 

By collecting the information and actually perform in python and pandas this becomes really easy to comprehend, I was impress how easy this may be compare to excel and how dynamic it is to play and see if the analysis done in a project is correct or not, as well as easy to track. 

I do believe when it comes to tools its impossible to only use one tool, and we need to understand how far can we go with one or the other, in this case python becomes essential to see what’s happening in a model and of course pandas as well.

Thanks to this sort of analysis we can share with our client faster and better what are the possible issues or things we need to avoid in the project to make it cost affordable, get a better criterion of design as well. 

The future of projects.

One of the things I have realized using workflows that focus in the data is how fast we can generate this analysis, if you were to create all this modelling to get a similar idea it will take way too long and for the beginning of the project create a model to get this statistics will be a waste of time. But playing with parameters, different attributes and code (Thanks God for code), we can create this really fast, and get an accurate behavior. 

I do believe AEC industry is changing a lot, and I’m looking forward to see how it keeps evolving cause it is getting more and more interesting but also more challenging, which is great. Although things sometimes don’t go as fast as we looking forward, I guess each one of us are the first to push forward to see and work with the correct workflow we want in a project. 

Special thanks to colleagues who enjoy this sort of workflow.