Discover how to export a clash report using Navisworks, enabling effective communication with your team regarding the clashes detected in your design. This article also highlights the potential benefits and downsides of different export options, such as separating or combining reports.
Key Insights
- The clash report functionality of Navisworks allows for the export of clash data in a format that can be read on any internet browser, facilitating easy sharing and collaboration with team members who may not have Navisworks.
- The export options include choosing what specific clashes to include in the report based on their status (new, active, reviewed, approved, or resolved), and whether to group them or show individual clashes. This provides the flexibility to create a report tailored to specific needs.
- Reports can be exported in XML or HTML formats. The XML format allows for import into programs like Microsoft Excel, while the HTML format can be read by all web browsers. The HTML tabular format is recommended for its readability.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, we'll be exporting a clash report into HTML format and we'll be using the bim361-complete.nwf model located in your Lesson 6 folder. And if you don't have Clash Detective open, make sure that you do open it and then you go to either the Select or Results tab.
The purpose of exporting a clash report is to communicate with the rest of your team what you're seeing in your Clash Detective. Often, your other team members aren't going to have access to this tool. They may have access to Navisworks Freedom, they may not have access to any version of Navisworks, but they probably don't have access to your original.nwf clash file.
So Navisworks allows us to export to a format that can be read with any internet browser. We've gone through at least one of our clash tests and we've created some comments, we've created some assignments to specific trades, and we've created viewpoints within our clash test. The one last thing we need to do is to make sure that we have the visibility that we want to export turned on.
I’d like "Dim Other" to be on and we will be able to select from the Reporting tab how we want Navisworks to export. If we have "Dim Other" turned on, then Navisworks will export this viewpoint with "Dim Other" turned on. And make sure you have "Transparent Dimming" checked on as well.
Let's go to the Report tab. Here's where we can select all of the options about how we want our clash report to appear. We can check on any one of the contents.
Learn CAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
The contents include things like location, what layer the object is clashing on, the status, and also things like the image—that's the thumbnail that will appear next to the clash itself taken straight from our viewpoint. And we can also include information from our Timeliner simulation. We're currently not running a simulation, so we can leave these fields off by unchecking.
We can also set whether we want only our groups to show up, or if we would like everything to show up underneath groups, or if we’d like only individual clashes to show. Group Headers is the one that I typically use, and that's because we concentrated on making viewpoints for the groups themselves. If we selected everything, then Navisworks would export each one of the clash views, and potentially, we could have thousands of images exported with the clash report.
So to keep it simple and to keep it concise, I recommend using Group Headers only. Then we can actually select what types of clashes we'd like to export. If our clashes are new and active, they will export to our report. If their status is set to Reviewed, Approved, or Resolved, they will not appear in the report.
And this is good because we've set one of our clash groups to Approved, which means we’ve already reviewed it. We don't need anybody else to look at it, so it will not show up on the report. No one else will need to worry about it.
We have the option to export reports as separate reports or combine them all into one report. I’ve done this both ways—it depends on the purpose of the clash report.
If you have a team member who does not need to look at, say, the electrical information and you have all tests exported as combined, then it will be in their report. Let's set it to separate just for this example. And then our report format—this is the file format that we can use to export.
XML is the Extensible Markup Language, a format that will allow us to export—or rather to import—into a program like Microsoft Excel. HTML—this is the old version of HTML that Navisworks used to, and still does, export. That’s the Hypertext Markup Language that is readable by all web browsers.
The HTML tabular is an easier-to-read HTML format, and that's the one that I recommend using. "As Viewpoints" is one that we’ll get to in the next video, and that's the format that you’d use to export all of your clashes as saved viewpoints—and it is very useful. So let's select HTML tabular and then click the button in the bottom right that says "Write Report."
It will first ask where you’d like to save it, and where you'd like to save it is in your Lesson 6 folder under Clash Report. Make a folder if you haven't already with today's date, and then make another folder underneath that called "separate." Select that "separate" folder and hit OK.
And then Navisworks will generate the HTML files and all the linked image files. Once it's exported, it will just go back to where it was. It won't tell you that it's finished exporting. Next, you can navigate to the Lesson 6 folder where you saved your clash report.
So I have Clash Report, today's date, and "separate." All these files are the HTML files that you can double-click to open, and these are the corresponding files that the HTML files refer back to. If you ever distribute these files, you'll want to make sure to also distribute the folders.
A good way would be to zip them all up. But let's take a look at the structural-versus-plumbing.html. Double-click to open it. Your default web browser will open, and you'll see a tabular HTML clash report.
You'll see on the left-hand side that you have an image of your clash, and then you have the clash name. The clash names in our case are the group names, because we only exported Group Headers. If you click on the images, you'll see an enlarged version of the image, and you'll see that we have some of these assigned to specific trades.
We have the status listed, and then we have the grid location. For example, Level 5, and its closest grid intersection is Gridline D and Gridline 1.1. It gives some useful information like the name of the item. This one is Item 1, this one is Item 2, and then at the very end, it shows the comments we’ve added.
We don't have any comments beside the "Assigned To" field in Group 4, but in Group 1, we have “pipes down below beams.” If you'd like to see an example of a combined clash report, you can go back to your Navisworks program and in the Report tab, you can change your report type to "All Tests Combined." Write that report to the Combined directory, and it will compile all our clash tests and only generate one HTML file. All of the image files will be under one folder, just combined in the order that it was exported.
We'll see that we have a header for Structural versus Plumbing, and then it’ll go into a header for Structural versus Mechanical, and then all the other clash tests in sequence. So that's how to export a clash report. Next, we'll be looking at how to export your clash reports into an NWD file under saved viewpoints, and we'll do that in the next video.
Thank you.