We are pleased to announce the release of an important update for Navisworks 2017. From today, subscription customers will be alerted of its availability through the Autodesk Desktop App. This update represents the culmination of a lot of work to focus on existing customer issues, and we hope that you find it of high value to your workflows with Navisworks.

Follow the simple instructions to install, and benefit from the following updates:

New IFC Loader

As Open BIM practices are now increasingly established globally, we have seen a rising number of users reporting issues with how Navisworks handles IFC files. Outside of Autodesk formats, it is the most used format in Navisworks today. And here at Autodesk, we take interoperability very seriously.

So when we started to look at some of the issues being reported, we also wanted to find a way to improve how to stay on top of this file format. It wasn't long before we looked sideways and saw what a great job the Revit team have done with IFC, and an idea started to form…

What if we could leverage that good work, and take advantage of an open source, community led, and regularly updated piece of technology? The good news is that I am not going to go into how, but can reveal that's exactly the approach we took. With some radical collaboration between our development teams, we have shared this technology, and Navisworks now has a new IFC loader. For our users, this means you should see parity with performance and updates with Revit IFC, which we think is pretty cool - and it fixes over 80% of our known bugs too..!

Until we update Navisworks with a full release, we have decided to make this loader an optional choice, so that we don't disrupt any existing workflows. Next time we release Navisworks we intend to make this the default, but we wanted to let users try it out and give us feedback - so please do that however you like: here, by email, or on Twitter using our @navisworks handle.

Here's a quick overview of what to expect with the new workflow:

Global Options – selecting the 'Revit_IFC' loader
After opening an IFC file, be sure to use the shaded view to see colours (IFC import doesn't support Autodesk materials directly, but does take colour through)
Newly supported IFC elements (yay – this is good news!) are now visible by default in Navisworks 2017. We'll update this to be hidden in the next release, but for now you should be able to hide them using these search sets that I created to help you – please see below:
1. IfcZone and IfcSpace elements
2. IfcOpeningElements

Performance Updates

Another area that we receive a lot of feedback on is performance. We started to notice a trend in some reported issues that seemed to be related. After some investigation, we were able to narrow this down to some well hidden issues with viewpoints, and we have implemented some fixes that I know many of you are going to be delighted with (you know who you are!). Here is the list of issues this piece of work deals with:

Customer Support: "Saved Viewpoints" are Becoming Incredibly Large Making Model Unusable

Customer Support: Abnormally Large BIM 360 Shared Views Crashing Glue & Field Mobile, and Very slow performance to open Shared Views from Navisworks

Viewpoints with overrides casues NWF filesize to increase drastically

NWF filesize increases significantly once you override colours and transparencies

Longer opening time in NW 2016 than in 2015 and Model created using Navisworks Manage 2016 SP1 is too big

As well as fixing this in this update (so it doesn't happen any more), we realised that many of you will have existing files that you will want to clean up and improve performance working with.

So this is new for Navisworks 2017 Update 1. Linked to this issue, we have also added the ‘optimise on load’ option to the Model - > Performance section in global options. It is disabled by default, but when enabled, will perform certain optimisations on load :

Delete duplicate redlines. All duplicate redlines from existing saved viewpoints will be deleted.
Optimise saved viewpoint overrides – Some old files could have saved viewpoint overrides with the same appearance stored multiple times. This optimisation removes that redundancy.
Delete duplicate material attributes – Some files loaded from IFC could have nodes with many 10s or 100s or material attributes on them. This optimisation removes all the extra material attributes from nodes.
These optimisations should help fix up existing NWD/NWF files that customers have.

These optimisations should help fix up existing NWD/NWF files that customers have.

Other fixes

Improved performance when switching views containing appearance overrides.
Added support for Solidworks 2015/2016 formats
Fixed an issue that could cause CER when using the Set Scale from measurement dialog for 2D sheets.

So that's it. We hope that you find these updates of use to your workflows, and that they make a difference. We've really tried to focus our attention on customer issues for this update, so it would be great to hear back from any of you that take advantage of this update and see some benefit. We continuously strive to fix the bugs we know about, so please keep telling us about them and we'll work hard to prioritise them and fix them if we can.

Enjoy, and thanks from all the team at Navisworks.