BlenderBIM 4D crash course
Enjoy learning, and hope to see some nice visuals of your projects in the near future!
Make sure to have the latest BlenderBim release to get access to new features and bug fixes.
Any questions or suggestions for future videos are welcome.
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Comments
This is AWESOME. Don't let the simple looking thumbnail fool you: it goes into detail with productivity rates, resource constraints, and gantt chart animations. I have learned so much I didn't even know was possible.
This is really cool and the depth of the existing tools is impressive.
One thing that I personally believe is desperately needed is a way of auto-attaching tasks to objects in the model. This would be based on rules. Generally speaking you would hope that most programmes are aligned with the metadata in the model. So the Name of a task in the programme would be equivalent to some Pset property of an object in the model, for example.
Once I get some time, this is high on the list of things I want to attempt myself with some Python-ing. There are a few other bits in my head, like the format of the CSV for import as a programme, but again, I need to dig my teeth into properly before I can make constructive suggestions.
This video and the clash features inside BB demonstrates how BB surpasses Navisworks. My suggestions:
1. Maybe not implemented yet but could be useful to be able to export all the quantifications and costs to a text file in order to create an estimative metric computation documentation.
2. In your opinion Animation tool can be a base to implement "Health and Safety" analysis too?
Team work makes the dream work !
Go for it ! I can give you a head start if you'd like; I have some old code that creates the schedule based on a WBS & adds product assignments based on queries, from a .json.
Although not shown in the crash course, there is the option to import a construction schedule from .csv aswell: here's the template and the code used to import from csv
I'm highly biased, but.. I have to agree.
Not yet to a text document, but you can export cost schedules to a spreadsheet in csv, xlsx or ods, Still got some improvements / formatting work to do on this. I'll demonstrate this in the next tutorial, and on the workshop 30 Sept. 2023
Absolutely ! But it requires keeping the .blend and .ifc together:
We could overcome the last two points by saving custom animation data, though this wouldn't be in the schema atm, and I'm not sure how to proceed in this scenario.
This is what Bexel does. I think sooner or later we need to do something similar. They can prepare a spreadsheet with two columns: selection rules in the first, and task IDs in the second.
@Bimlooser funny that you mention Navisworks. I know it gets a lot of flack, but honestly it's still a crucial bit of software in the real world.
The Timeliner in Navisworks is also incredibly user-friendly and intuitive. In fact I'd extend that to the majority of its toolset.
The cool thing about Navis is that I can create a simulation and I can then just send out the NWD to my engineers, planners, commercial, project managers. They have the ability to run the simulation themselves, get the viewpoints they're after, hide parts they don't want to see. And then of course take screenshots and put them into their powerpoints...
But Blender has a lot of potential. The fact that the 4D is built in to the native IFC is cool. The ability to add custom animations to objects as part of the automatic animation step is something I think could happen eventually. I do think that once again the limits around modding the vanilla GUI hamper these efforts slightly, but that probably ties more into this discussion rather than on this thread.
Ideally you wouldn't even need to bring an external spreadsheet into the equation. To use Navisworks as an example again (sorry), the auto-match rules are saved within your user files (somewhere), so you can use them any time you start a new session. You can even export and import xmls with these rules saved.
If it were possible to do the same in Blender (I'm thinking a bit like how Saved Searches works?), then that would be cool.
@CSN
Yes, this would be cool. There is a related discussion going on here:
https://community.osarch.org/discussion/1402/
@SigmaDimensions
Thanks for all your work! Really cool to see what is possible now.
In my opinion we can achieve auto-match rules with a sort of this workflow that is similar to Navis'one.
1. Use "Search Tool" to aggregate elements and save as a specific name;
2. Create TimeLine tasks with same names;
3. Create (unfortunately I don't Know how to and if it's very difficult) a script to embed as a button in BB that assigs to the task the objects grouped and named as the task
I think be able to export "searches" into other session in blend could be useful (maybe already possible) .
What do you think?
@Bimlooser you could definitely approach it like that. But you can already do steps 1-2 as we are. So if you need to write some Python to do step 3, you may as well write something clever that can use information from property sets.
As a side note, creating a custom script with buttons etc isn't that difficult - although doing it in a nice clean way which interacts with the rest of BBIM nicely would be the challenge. On my end I will probably just hack it together. But that's how you learn. I have this playlist on the bookmarks to give it a go. There is also this thread by Gorgious and the accompanying wiki-page.
Wow, had no idea that BB has this kind of functionality. I am still stuck in my limited Revit-based architectural design world ;) This is incredible and seems like a proper project management tool in addition to a potential design tool.
Might be useful to have a specific UI interface to make the creation of a GANTT chart with dependencies easier
@SigmaDimensions i loved your videos already, but this is like... chef's kiss.
the thing i was just euphoric to see was calculating manhour depending on the conditions. and the task bars were the cherry on top. really amazing work. thank you.
@dimitar indeed, one possibility would be to run a web browser interface side by side with Blender - so some things you can edit in the browser (e.g. more spreadsheets style things or gantt chart things).