2021-05-09 | 2023-01-12 | 2023-01-22

2023-01-12

Diary

Basic Site Creation

Decide where you are going to place the site using the Oasis web interface. I have chosen the centre of Manchester. It's no more complicated than placing a pin on a map:

Oasis Web

Here is the basic site. I haven't added any additional details, customers references, access details etc. All it has is a site ID. In this case S000007:

Basic site

Launch the Oasis 3D desktop application and download your freshly created site:

Log in	Site mode
Site ID	Download

This is the basic site. At this height you get a nice view of the Pennines:

Basic S000007

We can place equipment without a building model. My "records" (in this case my imagination) tell me there are three antennas with bearings 0, 120 and 240 degrees and the base of each antenna is 72.5m above sea level:

Components

Ten minutes after creating the site I can confirm that the antennas have an adequate separation zone and are pointing in roughly the right direction. Without leaving the office!

This might be all that is needed. A simple visualisation of components in a geographic context. However, at some point a detailed building model is required. The detailed model can come from a variety of sources. In rare cases the building owner may have an existing model that can be shared - happy days! Often there is no model and one must be commissioned. There are many ways to achieve this but our default method is to create a Revit model from on-site LiDaR scans and 360 panoramas. The 3D model (from Revit or MicroStation or Blender or Maya or any other CAD/Modelling package) may be part of a larger system or it may exist solely in Oasis 3D.

In a perfect world the different organisations responsible for telecoms (wired and wireless), electricity, gas, air-conditioning, alarm systems, networking, physical access, grounds maintenance etc. share a common context and exchange BIM (Building Information Model) data in a structured and organised fashion. Unfortunately, this is rare. We address this problem by assuming that the building model is maintained by someone else - even though that someone is probably us.

To this end we strip out the parts of the model that are 'owned' by Oasis, e.g. antennas, cabinets, brackets etc. When these items change - Oasis tells Revit. When the building changes (ducting, steelwork, access route?) then Revit tells Oasis.

Throughout this process we leverage the Epic Games Datasmith tools and workflow that was specifically designed for this.

This is site S000007 with the new building model (B000175) at the bottom of the screen in the centre:

B000175 centre-bottom

Here is a closer view. It looks my "records" (my imagination) were not quite right. Time to make some updates:

Rooftop

I have moved the antennas to the correct location:

The Revit connector reads the new location and updates the drawing. Here is a roof detail.

Orthographic

You want context? Oasis 3D gives you context: