Importing the Visual to Power BI
This tutorial covers how to import the Tracer 3D Power BI Visual (*.PBIVIZ file) into a Microsoft Power BI report. Use the same workflow to replace the trial visuals with the “Demo” watermark with the licensed version.
Initial Setup
This tutorial introduces how to set up and format the Tracer 3D Power BI visual to view 3D Revit data. The 3D Power BI visual included Tracer V3 contains numerous visual performance enhancements and formatting settings to improve the user experience for integrating 3D within the Microsoft Power BI environment.
Conditional Formatting
This video covers how the 3D Power BI visual included in Tracer 3D supports Conditional Formatting for color coding objects in Power BI. Conditional formatting is a great way to create heat maps!
Context Feature
The visual offers the option to classify elements as Context so they can act as “background” geometry with different display settings from the rest of the model elements.
This example shows two separate models with elements from one model being used as ‘context” for coordination purposes.
Views Feature
This tutorial covers new options available for leveraging the 3D visuals “view” input and displaying categorized model geometry within multiple viewports within the 3D Power BI visual.
In V3, we introduced new options for independent camera navigation for multiple views.
Combining Data From Multiple Revit Models in Power BI
The 3D Tracer visual can be used to display multiple 3D views using the “Views” input field. The result is an array of views that shows objects grouped in separate parallel 3D views. This is a good way to show components of a complex Revit assembly in multiple Power BI viewports.
- Learn how to ‘Append” multiple element database tables into a single table
- Learn how to combine 3D models into a single 3D visual in Power BI
- Learn how to index each model to filter and slice the model data
Troubleshooting the Display of Large Meshes
Power BI reports have a known character limit of 32,766 characters which can make it problematic to load very large text strings into the report environment. This can have impacts on the Tracer visuals ability to parse larger Revit mesh strings (gLTF) that Power BI has automatically truncated in the report environment. This video demonstrates a workaround for working with large strings of data and getting them to display.
- Understand Power BI’s text character limits
- Show a workflow for splitting strings into multiple columns
- Show how to recombine (concatenate) mesh strings as a custom column