Sheet
generation
Generating views is one of the most time consuming tasks while creating sale sheets. This algorythm allows to create these with little effort.
Further, create schedules, and keyplans and stick everything together on a sale sheet. Done!
image by courtesy of BBGK Arcihtekci ltd.
“Jaśminowy Mokotów”, BBGK Architekci
Shown tool is part of the bigger workflow that was used when developing the design for big housing project in Warsaw, Poland. Automation was strictly involved with design team and design processes. One of which would be marketing sheet generation for several of the buildings.
Starting from BIM model, algorythm calculates proper apartment outline and accordingly, creates the cropped floorplan. It was crucial to include shafts and wall thicknesses as it was part of the investors template.
Further it creates subcomponents of the marketing sheet corresponding to the clients requirements – schedules, keyplans, annotations, metadata and placeholder sheets. All of them were designed as stand alone algorythms for the purpose of interchangablity with other projects and selective implementations.
Lastly, all components are placed on the generated sheets and printed out in required naming convention.
Window
assessment
While working with historic building or crazy fasace. Creating accurate window assessment is painful. This script understands that and creates all needed views for selected elements.
Office villa, Zurich, Switzerland
Working with historic building and strugling with real dimensions is a great way to find options to save ones time. Previewed algorythm was used in one of such buildings for creating accurate documentation for all the windows in the project. Its important to point out that the more complex the algorythm, the harder it is to make it universal. While this particular script haven’t yet let me down – it does not resolve the issue of skylights or roof windows. 
While workflow seems pretty strightforward – identify window, identify room that it belongs to, finding its orientation and finally creating views and putting them on dedicated sheet. It all came down to troubleshooting and discrepancies in software architecture.
When finally views are created. One can use similar methodology to generate views of walls – for opening shop drawings or detail views of furniture – for more sophisticated interiors. This way of thinking allows one to fully embrace BIM technology and make use of it while not putting that much time into it.
Design
support
Huge amount of work is put into clearing the designs and making it more strightforward. This one, helps numbering rooms in appartments which is quite troublesome as you can see on the begining.
While this tool is very simple, it saved many hours on several projects.
Time is invaluable
As previewd above – automation can be usefull in various aspects. The Simplest is simplyfing common tasks that take up a lot of hours. As time is something that is invaluable – thirst for work optimization is always there. There are numerous ways to be more efficient, below you can find few ideas how to do it with use of computational tool.
One option would be to use of these tool to check the drawings. In context of building law constraints one can check if the design meets the requirments. e.g. checking if structural columns are far enough from parking spots.
Another solution is to make simple calculation, whether is area, volume or distance, not mentioning more complex objects. Data-driven decision making is a crucial component of efective design.