My Journey from CAD to BIM: A True Underdog Story

With the ever-increasing use of BIM models and 3D technology in the A/E/C sector, there have been numerous efforts to transition from 2D CAD to 3D object-based digital twin models. When first introduced to FME Form (nee’ Workbench), I was immediately inspired to use it for this purpose. To create a Revit model in the conventional way, it takes several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a medium-sized office building. For many public and private sector institutions charged with building and maintaining real estate assets, this is a deal breaker, or at the very least, a long, expensive effort. The goal is not to make a highly detailed LOD 400 federated Revit model, but rather a geometrically correct ‘lighter’ version that can be used for future projects and attain the ‘critical mass’ needed to start a BIM program. Having one or two conventional models out of many buildings will not achieve that, interest will wane, and the expensive models will soon be out of date. I will be demonstrating my workflow to generate LOD 200 Revit models from CAD files and a few other data sources using CAD, FME and pyRevit. The majority of the work is on the CAD side, with FME interpreting the files into data used by a custom pyRevit extension in Revit. Like the movie Dodgeball, I had naysayers, uninterested users, many technical challenges, and a well-resourced competition that were dismissive of my scrappy, outside-the-box methods. This has been a 4 year long journey so far and is still evolving, but there has been redemption as others have seen my process in action. I think you will be entertained!