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.
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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 lessons 6 folder. And if you don't have Clash Detective open, make sure that you do open it and then you go to the 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. Now 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 the dimother to be on and we will be able to select from the reporting tab how we want Navisworks to export. If we have dimother turned on, then Navisworks will export this viewpoint with the dimother 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 clashed port to show. We can check on any one of the contents.
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The contents include things like location, what layer the object is clashing is called, 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 classes 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 then we would essentially have well potentially we could have thousands of images exported with the clash report.
So to make it simple and to be as concise as possible 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 and if their status is set to reviewed, approved, or resolved then they will not show up in the report at all.
And this is good because we've set one of our clash groups to approved which means that we've already looked over it. We don't need anybody else to look at it so it will not show up on the report. Nobody else will have 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 what the purpose of the clash report is.
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 let's select the button on the bottom right that says write report.
It's going to first ask you where you'd like to save it and where you'd like to save it is in your lesson six 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. And select that separate folder and hit okay.
And then Navisworks will make the HTML files and it'll also make all the linked files and those are the images. Once it's exported it will just go back to where it was. It won't tell you that it's finished exporting and next you can navigate to the lesson four folder that you saved your clash report under.
So I have clash report, today's date, and separate. So all of these files, these are the HTML files that you can double click to open and these are the corresponding files that the HTML files will 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 dot 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. Hey 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 five and it's at the 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 one, this one is item two, and then at the very end it tells you the shows the comments that we've left.
We don't have any comments beside the assigned to in group four but on group one 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 then it will take all of our clash tests and only make one html file and 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 a nwd file under saved viewpoints and we'll do that in the next video.
Thank you.