Beyond Design

Invitation to our beta program for Navisworks Hubble

We'd like to invite our Navisworks users to our Hubble beta program. This is great chance to get early access to our next software release, understand how the new features can benefit your workflows and provide us with input, feedback and suggestions for improvement. If you are interested in participation then please sign up using the link below with a valid work email address (i.e. not Gmail, Yahoo etc.) and completing a short survey.

 Navisworks Hubble Beta program

Tips and Tricks - Autodesk Graphics in Navisworks

I like to consider myself as a bit of an expert when it comes to using Navisworks. I've been using it almost every day for over seven years, you tend to know it inside out in that time. Occasionally however you find something out where you kick yourself for never having tried something out, that moment happened on THEbar, the 'genius bar' of Autodesk experts at Autodesk University 2012 where one of my colleagues pointed out this tip.

In your normal viewing mode, how do you get from this: -

To this?

It's fair to say that it does make models look more appealing!

Here's how to do it, open Options (F12) and Interface > Display, switch off Auto-Select and change the system from Presenter to Autodesk

Then go into Interface > Display > Autodesk in the options.

Switch on Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, change Shader Style to Phong (there are other options), and change the Multi Sample Anti Aliasing (MSAA) Level to '4x', higher will significantly affect performance.

Obviously this view isn't for everyone, and may not have the same performance on larger models, but it may help in reviews where you are looking for management buy in.

Glued to Autodesk University

As I write this I'm on a return plane to the UK after a brilliant, and my first Autodesk University. It's fair to say that the talk of this year was BIM 360 and Navisworks and how they will transform the way people work in the construction industry.

From the opening keynote with CEO Carl Bass, CIO Jeff Kowalski, and 12 year old star in the making, Schuyler St. Leger showing a huge range of Autodesk tools available that can change how you work today, not tomorrow, to the constant stream of people flowing through the Autodesk 360 lounge, THEbar, a customer expert area, and exhibition halls asking about workflows can be optimized and processes made more efficient, and how Navisworks and BIM 360 complement taking work into the field. The launch of the tablet modelling tool, Formit and online experience design, Fusion 360 were other highlights in a packed schedule.

Between the meetings and out chatting to you guys and girls around the conference, I also managed to speak at the class 'Building the Death Star: The Autodesk Way' A Star Wars themed geekathon based around more advanced use of Timeliner, helped out beginner users at the Navisworks Quick Spin classes and spoke to many of you about problems, questions, and even just talking more about this blog! Of course it wasn't all work, the annual AUGI Beer Bust, and closing night party were both spectacular ways to unwind and network. There were exhibitors from all over the world showing off tools, plugins, and hardware to make your working life easier, here is the full list of exhibitors, and we highly recommend you check them out.

Don't forget, you didn't have to be there to access a huge range of materials to improve your product knowledge and understand the benefits of moving to and expanding your use of BIM, AU Virtual is free to register for and has hundreds of classes available to stream right now. If you did miss out, maybe now is the time to start working on your boss so you get to attend AU 2013!

What Does the Cloud do for Me?

In my previous post, BIM 360 Glue On The Go, I mentioned that I assumed product management responsibilities for the BIM 360 Glue mobile app around 10 months ago - that takes us back to Autodesk University 2011. Whilst there I was able to share with a group of construction customers (under a non-disclosure agreement, of course) an early research prototype created by our development team. That prototype was looking to see whether the core Navisworks technology could be leveraged on iOS, and we found that we were able to handle BIM models at least 10-times larger than we had seen before on a mobile device. "This looks promising", said some of those customers. "When can we have it?" asked many others in the room.

Initially we hoped it would be much sooner than 10 months, however in that same week another twist of fate took place - Autodesk acquired Horizontal Systems (with their solution Horizontal Glue being rebranded as Autodesk BIM 360 Glue earlier this year).

If ever there were two technology stacks and engineering teams that were meant to be together, this is them - Navisworks has been well established in the AEC space for over a decade, and fundamentally addresses a key problem of being able to bring together the (often large) design data of BIM projects for coordination on PC's. BIM 360 Glue addresses a similar need, however starting out with a foundation of collaboration, which greatly simplifies the process of gathering models from your design partners, and delivering instant access and simultaneous review capabilities - I'm thrilled that our teams have united over the past 10 months - and what I hope you see in the BIM 360 Glue mobile app is the evolution of Navisworks technology (which maximizes the limited memory and computing power available on mobile devices), unified with the collaborative power of Glue (which makes it easier to access your models and stay current) - if only the branding team would let me get away with calling it SuperGlue... J

 

If you're still asking what the cloud can do for you, well I think one of the best things the cloud offers is, facilitating a connected experience – connecting people to their data; and connecting people to people, thereby improving collaboration. The first release of the BIM 360 Glue app provides a means of connecting the mobile user to their latest-version models in Glue, which may be individual design models from Revit, etc. or merged models aggregated within Glue, or models aggregated in Navisworks and uploaded to Glue. From a collaboration perspective, if you're using the BIM 360 Glue web client, then as part of your review process you can send notifications to other users of let's say, a specific area of interest in the model. Upon receiving this notification, it will include a unique URL, and if you follow this link from your iPad mail client it will take you directly to the mobile app, automatically open the relevant model and take you to the exact area of interest. "One-click to BIM" (or technically with a touch interface, one-tap to BIM, but that doesn't sound so snappy).

This is what should be the start of many collaborative workflows we'll deliver across Autodesk and the BIM 360 solution. These will not only better link the design teams into pre-construction workflows, but also extends into the construction phase through BIM 360 Field, for Field Management, Commissioning and Handover (delivered through another recent acquisition of Vela Systems). It's clear that mobile capabilities will be an important means of project participants capturing data anytime and anywhere, and making that available to the rest of the team. This will help to reduce a lot of the wasted time (and resource) seen in construction today, through delays in getting information to the right people, and getting the right people together (when often not co-located) so that they can make informed decisions.

Managing Multiple Clash Tests

In this, the next of our series of blog posts about making the most of Clash Detective, we're going to cover the use of multiple clash tests. Now that we have shown you how to use rules to minimize false positives and use grouping, filtering and sorting to manage the results of each individual test, we're going to talk about how you would want to scale this up to a project level and use and manage multiple tests.

Depending on your role and industry you may have different schools of thought on the best way to do this, and there is no 'correct way', just what works best for your project, the level of input needed from various stakeholders, and the timescale you need to do this in. Here I'm going to go through a few of these schools of thought to give you a few options that may work for you.

Clash the BIG stuff first

In a project where you are bringing many disciplines into a single digital mock up, you will want to make sure that the 'big' things don't clash, as these will be the things that cost the most money to put right. Generally this will be structural work, but it may include underground pipes, tunnels, sewers, or existing structure that cannot be touched or moved. Then you can move through the disciplines to the work that can be more easily and cheaply changed.

Reducing tolerances in steps

Another way to work through clashes is to look at those which need most movement to resolve first, and then reduce the tolerances of the clashes. Typically you would run these as multiple tests so you can see if any changes to the model reintroduce larger clashes e.g. Setting up 'Architecture vs MEP > 1ft', 'Architecture vs MEP 1ft to 6in', 'Architecture vs MEP 6in to 3in', 'Architecture vs MEP 3in to 0', 'Architecture vs MEP insulation'. Here you can work to varying tolerances at once and then set up additional clearance clashes to ensure there's enough room for insulation, or gaps needed for access, looking at each test with the aim of 'getting to zero' then working on the next tolerance.

By level or section

Working through a project level by level, or splitting up the model into sections such as wings of a hospital or groups of rooms, can allow you to show visible progress in coordination meetings and split the work into bite size chunks, or you can work through basement levels that will be built first then work through higher levels whilst the project is already underway. New features like Revit Grids and Levels appearing in the clash results will help you refine the clash results to a precise location in the building. You should ensure that if you use this method that you cover the overlap between levels and also ensure that you test against objects not assigned to a level, or that you cover multiple sections.

Pre-fabricated comes first

There's a number of reasons why this is a good idea. If something has been fabricated off site then the likelihood is that it cannot be changed later, or if it can, could it be done more cheaply with less risk in a factory environment than on site. There's may also be longer lead times with pre-fabricated goods than with other components that can be created or assembled on site, getting these finalized as early as possible prevents delays later on.

Ad hoc tests

There'll usually be a need for testing 'on the go' with unusual or site specific scenarios or just sanity checks against issues that need to be double checked when in doubt, we encourage you to use these in addition to some formalized testing. If you have some sort of order to the rest of your testing that covers the majority of common scenarios then you should only need to do a few ad hoc tests to make sure everything else is covered. If you find most of your tests are ad hoc for each project then it may be worth taking some time out to work out if there is a way to provide some order to the madness.

Here's the next of our video playlist showing you how to create and use multiple playlists.

It is likely that your eventual approach will be a combination of some or all of these methodologies or some completely different ones, do you have different ways of managing your tests? We'd love to hear from you, any feedback you can give us will be passed to our development team for future consideration. Just email beyond.design@autodesk.com with how you do things.

Service Pack 2 now available for Autodesk Navisworks 2013

A service pack is now available for Autodesk Navisworks 2013 products. You can download and install the Autodesk Navisworks 2013 Service Pack 2 from our website

If you have experienced any of the following issues then we recommend you upgrade to the Service Pack 2

• Performance issues when working with a large volume of selection and search sets.
• Issue where some commands appear disabled after dragging a selection set to a folder.
• Unhide command didn't work at the folder level for sets hidden in folders.
• Crash when trying to drag a set into a folder.
• Area/Volume properties from Revit Drawings not available.
• Inventor models are rotated at 90-degrees.
• A number of unexpected crashes in Clash Detective
• Unhide All taking much longer when Clash Detective is open.
• Not possible to rename a Clash result after a drag and drop.
• Clash groups expand unexpectedly.
• Renaming results in the Clash results grid performance issues. 
• Resolved a performance issue where loading a model is extremely slow when Timeliner is open.
• 2D measurement start, end and difference values are incorrect.
• Cancelling or closing the options editor using keyboard shortcuts retains options.
• Cinepak Codec for 64 bit is now available.
• CSV export from Selection Inspector now available

Please select the relevant 32 or 64 bit version for Manage, Simulate or Freedom. This can be installed on each individual machine which already has Navisworks 2013 installed, included in the installation, or included in a deployment, the readme contains more instructions.

Should you have any issues installing the service pack, please use the Installation and Licensing forums which are monitored by Autodesk experts.

UPDATE: After a couple of queries we just want to confirm that Service Pack 2 contains all the fixes from Service Pack 1, meaning you do not need to install that separately. 

Building the Death Star, The Autodesk Way – Autodesk University 2012

Inspired by this post by Jason Dodds from 2009, I'll be at this year's Autodesk University at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, talking all about Star Wars. Well sort of…

Imagining a world where Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine had Autodesk tools to hand and fully embraced the concept of BIM, not only could the lives of countless stormtroopers been saved during construction, but they could have saved the Death Star from destruction completely.

I'll be talking about contingency planning using Navisworks and Microsoft Project, creating time based clashes for temporary works, using Revit construction parts to build an accurate schedule and linking animations to Timeliner for powerful presentations, all things that apply to building projects on this planet as well as flying death machines in space. I'm having a great time spending my weekends and evenings modeling Tie fighters in Inventor and futuristic looking curtain wall panels in Revit (I live a life of simple pleasures!), and hope that as well as learning how you can use the Building Design Suite more effectively, you'll enjoy geeking out with me in a couple of months' time.

You can now register for Building the Death Star, The Autodesk Way which is filling up quickly.

If you register for Autodesk University before October 14^th you'll save $500, those associated with education get a heavily discounted rate too.

If you need to convince your boss to let you go to Autodesk University, use this "Convince Your Manager Toolkit" to find plenty of useful ammunition, and plenty of reasons for them to go to. And a couple of funny posts appeared on the Revit Forum Blog about how to tell you wife or husband that you're going to AU2012.

See you in Las Vegas!

Grouping, Filtering and Sorting Clash Results in Navisworks

Once you have used rules to get rid of false positives and concentrate on the areas you actually care about, you'll still potentially have hundreds of results to sort through either individually or in coordination meetings. Using the grouping, filtering and sorting features you'll be able to easily look at clashes in a certain area, group similar issues together, and filter out the issues that aren't relevant to the meeting you are in.

Grouping

Using the grouping options you can collect issues together that affect specific contractors, specific types of issues, related issues or just to help order the work you will be doing.

Grouping will count a group of clashes as a single issue, so you may want to select a beam, right click and "Group Clashes Involving Item", this will then allow you to deal with all clashes involving that beam as a single issue whilst you consider whether to move the beam, or the objects clashing with it. You can then select the group header to see all clashes in that group, by using the display settings Transparent Dimming and Auto Reveal you can see where these are in relation to each other and work out the next course of action.

Grouping items by grid intersection or by level can be an easy way to split up work between several members of a team. And using Filtering and Sorting you can quickly get together similar types of issues and group these together for further investigation.

Filtering

Filtering is a great way to refine the results you have visible, much in the same way as you may use the filtering tools in a search engine to get from 1,000,000 results for videos of a "cute kitten" to the 20 relevant ones from the last week.

For example if you have created a Search Sets for different duct sizes, you can reduce the number of visible results between the Mechanical and Steel work by selecting a duct size then using the "Filter by Selection" button (). The filter by selection option can also be used to look at clashes involving a single pipe or beam.

By right clicking in the results pane you can also 'Quick Filter' the results based on who a clash is assigned to, it's current status, or with Revit 2013 models, filter objects by the level they are on.

Sorting

You can sort the columns in the Results tab to gain clearer visibility of the results, for example you can prioritize rework by sorting the Distance column to work out which issues will need the most movement of an object, or to look through the list of who is assigned to each clash. Using this in combination with filtering can quickly narrow down the most serious issues that need to be addressed first.

I hope this provides some more insight in best practices for using Clash Detective and if you have any other topics or tools you would like us to cover, please email us or contact us on Twitter.

Using Clash Rules in Navisworks to reduce False Positives

To many the single most valuable tool in Navisworks is Clash Detection. I've seen many different figures from $5,000 upwards as the average cost of fixing an issue on site as opposed to resolving the issue first in your virtual model.

However managing the process of tens of thousands of potential clashes can be daunting and time consuming. It doesn't have to be; this is the start of a series of blog posts about getting the most out of clash detection in Navisworks, and this first post is a comprehensive guide to setting up clash rules to reduce false positives.

First up, a video with an introduction to Clash Detective Rules: -

So Clash Rules can allow you to ignore clashes that you aren't currently interested in, aren't real clashes, or are issues with 'unfinished' work which you will review later. Here are some more details about each pre-defined rule.

• Ignore Items in same layer

  This will ignore any clashes between objects on the same layer as the selection, if you are not sure what level the layer is, look for this icon () in the Selection Tree. For example, if you wanted to ignore clashes on the same level from a Revit 2013 file.

• Ignore Items in same group/block/cell
  This will ignore any clashes between objects in the same group, block or cell as the selection. A group can be a block definition from AutoCAD files or cell definition from MicroStation files - look for this icon () in the Selection Tree.
• Ignore Items in same file

  This will ignore items within the same file, so if your model contains multiple CAD files and you just want to check for clashes against other files then select this option. It can be used when you are assuming that a file will be self-clashed in the future. For example, you want to check your Level 2 Mechanical File that isn't yet complete against the structural work. This will ignore any clashes within that Mechanical File.

• Ignore Items in same composite object

  A composite object () is a group of geometry that is considered a single object in the Selection Tree. For example, a window object might be composed of a frame and a pane, or a cavity wall may be made of several layers. This rule would ignore any clashes between the two parts of the same object, For example, the window pane and the frame may be modeled so that the parts touch or overlap. This rule would ignore clashes between them.

• Ignore Items in previously found pair of composite objects

  This is one of the most useful rules to reduce the number of false positives. Whereas 'Ignore Items in the same composite object' will ignore clashes between parts of a single object, this will ignore multiple clashes between different composite objects. For example, if you have a window and pane composite object and a cavity wall composite object, this will report a single clash between the window and the wall rather than multiple clashes between the window frame and the leaves of the wall and the window pane and the leaves of the wall.

• Ignore Items in coincident snap points

  This covers any items found clashing that have snap points that coincide, for example pipe runs and fittings that have snap points at the end of center lines. Navisworks will draw a cylinder as a series of triangles to improve performance (try Hidden Line mode to see how they are drawn). Depending on the faceting factor of the cylinder, some of the triangles may clash with each other, even if the pipe or fittings would fit snuggly if this was drawn as completely round.

Here's a few examples of which rules you may want to use, and when.

• If you are using a cavity wall in your model which is made of several layers; outer leaf, insulation, inner leaf, plasterboard, you can use the rules "same composite object" to reduce clashes from touching leaves, and "previously found pair of composite objects" to count any clashes with the wall as a single clash rather than four.
• If you are running a check of a pipe run with fittings you can use the rules "coincident snap points" and "previously found pair of composite objects" to reduce clashes reported between fixtures and the pipes and within the fixtures.
• If you are looking to check for major clashes between pipes and structure on an early pass, you probably don't want to look for clashes within each model. Use "same file" and "previously found pair of composite objects" to avoid looking within a file of the same discipline and only report a single clash result wherever one discipline intersects a composite object made of several parts.

In a future blog we'll go into more detail about creating your own rules, why you would want to, and how to do it, if there's anything you want to know about rules, leave a comment or use the links on the left to email us.

AU 2012 Class Catalog Is Live

Start planning your AU experience now, there's plenty of classes about Revit, Navisworks, Construction and this year one from me about building the Death Star! More about that in the coming weeks.

The preview version of the Autodesk University 2012 class catalog is now available. View it now and start planning your AU schedule.

Class space at AU is limited so plan to sign up when AU registration opens early for AU members on August 28. Becoming an AU members is as easy as enrolling free at http://au.autodesk.com  

Highlights for AU 2012 include:
Advanced features and workflows
Cloud, mobile technologies, and visualization
Autodesk Certification preparation
New! Educator Summit
Innovation Forums
Media & Entertainment Dev. Network Conference

View the Catalog Now 

https://www.autodeskuniversity2012.com/connect/publicDashboard.ww

(note the server is being hit by thousands of anxious people and getting slow)

Remember, early registration for AU members starts 1 week before general registration. Plan to register starting August 28, 2012. Learn more about AU 2012.

Cheers,
Shaan

 

via autodesk.blogs.com