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.