For a year I designed the insides of a chemical plant in Malaysia without ever setting foot in it. That’s normal, by the way. These days, big buildings get built twice: once as a detailed 3D model, and then for real.
What I actually did
I was an MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing) Design Engineer at Petrocon. MEP is everything inside a building that makes it work: pipes, ducts, cables, drainage, fire protection. The structure is the skeleton. MEP is the organs.
We worked in BIM (Building Information Modelling). Instead of flat drawings, you build the whole plant as a 3D model where every object knows what it is. A pipe isn’t just two lines on paper. It knows its size, material, what it carries and which system it belongs to. I worked mainly in Revit, built custom components (Revit calls them families) and produced drawings in AutoCAD.
Clashes, and why they matter
In a model this big, with several teams designing at the same time, things collide. We call them clashes.
- Pipe against pipe.
- Structure against MEP, like a pipe running straight through a steel beam.
- Fire protection against MEP, like a sprinkler line fighting a cable tray for the same space.
- And every other combination you can imagine.
Every clash caught in the model costs a few minutes to fix. Every clash found on site costs days, money and some very creative language from the construction crew.
We used Navisworks to detect them. It’s good at finding clashes, but it’s a separate program, so you’d find the problem in one place and fix it in another. Jump, fix, export, re-check, jump again. I wanted that information inside Revit, where the actual work was happening.
The pipe question
Then a client asked a simple question: how many pipes are in this particular section of an open room?
Simple question. The plant covered acres. The section was full of pipework running in every direction. Counting by hand wasn’t just slow, it was guaranteed to be wrong, and the answer would be out of date the moment someone moved a pipe.
Dynamo to the rescue
Dynamo is a visual programming tool that plugs into Revit. Instead of writing code line by line, you connect blocks together. “Take all pipes.” “Keep only the ones inside this area.” “Count them.” “Show me the result.”
I built a Dynamo script that answered the client’s question in a few seconds. And because it read the live model, you could run it again after every change and always get the current answer.
Once that worked, the same approach extended naturally to clash information, pulling it into Revit so the team could see and fix problems without hopping between programs all day.
What happened next
Within three months of that work, I was promoted to team lead.
I think about that project a lot. The skill wasn’t really Revit or Dynamo. It was noticing that a question everyone assumed would take days could be turned into a system that takes seconds. That’s the same thing I do now with ad tracking and business automation. Different industry, same habit.
It was a fun project. I learned more in that year than in some whole courses.