Delve into the process of creating clash reports, saving them as viewpoints, and publishing an NWD file that incorporates the clash report with Navisworks. This detailed guide explores each step of the process, offering practical tips and recommendations to streamline your clash report creation workflow.
Key Insights
- The guide recommends changing the report type to 'all tests separate', which, though not mandatory, makes it easier to manage the saved viewpoints, particularly when exporting multiple clash reports for ongoing projects.
- Creating a file system within your saved viewpoints allows you to save multiple clash reports as a record. This process involves creating new folders for the clash reports and sorting them by date to avoid overwriting data.
- By organizing clash tests as viewpoints and saving the file as an NWF, you can subsequently publish your model to a different file extension. The guide underscores the importance of not working in an NWD, as it can potentially disrupt links in the selection tree and prevent updates to the architectural model.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, we'll be looking at how to make clash reports as saved viewpoints and then how to publish an NWD file that contains that clash report. We'll be using the bim361-complete model in your Lesson 6 folder.
If you don't have Clash Detective open, make sure you toggle that on, and we'll be going to the Report tab of the Clash Detective. If you saved your file from the last video, which was the video in which we exported a clash report to HTML, then all of your content settings and your other export settings will have remained the same. The only thing different that we have to do this time is to change our report format to "As Viewpoints."
One other thing that's recommended is to change your report type to "All Tests Separate." You don't have to do this, but it's helpful to export with report type set to "All Tests Separate" as viewpoints.
If you don't have the Saved Viewpoints panel open, go ahead and open it and then turn off Auto Hide. Next, we'll just go to "Write Report, " and then you'll see that your clash tests will appear with the labels from Clash Detective. Because you'll be running multiple clash tests over the coming weeks, if this is an ongoing project, you'll want to have a file system within your saved viewpoints that allows you to save multiple clash reports as a record.
So just leaving the clash tests as viewpoints in their own folders in the root is not going to work, since next time you export, it's going to overwrite these. Let’s create a new folder for these by right-clicking on the Saved Viewpoints panel and then going to "New Folder." Let's call this Clash Reports.
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This folder will house all of our clash reports. Then we'll make another new folder and call this one today's date. This is going to be the same date as the HTML clash report that we've exported before. Then I'm going to select the first clash report folder and then the last one while holding down Shift so that it selects all of them in between.
Then I'm going to drag those into the today's date folder. You can collapse these if you'd like. Let's take a look at what's under these folders.
Structural versus Plumbing has, first of all, a "Reset Appearance" viewpoint, and this is much like the Full Render and Overrides viewpoints that we made. The only purpose is to reset the appearance of the model. If you hit Reset Appearance, then Navisworks actually takes whatever you have on screen and changes the appearance back to a default setting. This is because if you go into, say, the Group 1 viewpoint, you might not get the result you want.
Let me try it one more time. Yes, if we go to the Group 1 viewpoint, then you'll see that Navisworks will have overridden the appearance of our model. This is not Clash Detective doing this anymore.
This is the viewpoint applying "Dim Other" and highlighting or changing the colors of our clashed items. When we go to Reset Appearance, then it removes that, and I think that's a pretty ingenious tactic that Autodesk was able to implement in this program. Now that we have our clash tests organized as viewpoints, we can save this file first as an NWF—just by hitting Save—and second, we'll be able to publish it to a different file extension.
Let's go to the Navisworks application button and go to Publish. We can call this one BIM 361 Clash Report with today's date. It's probably a different date when you're looking at this video.
Subject: you can put anything you want in here. Author: you can put your name. Publisher: can be your company's name.
Published For, Copyright, Keywords, Comments, Password—these fields are optional, but if you would like to have metadata in your file, then you can simply fill them out. We'll call this "Review for Lesson 4." If you set a password, then whoever opens this file in the future will have to enter that password.
This is for security. You can make this file expire, and this is a self-destruct function. If you check "Expires On" and enter a date, the file will no longer be accessible after that date.
It will still exist on your hard drive, but when you try to open it, it will say no. And then hit OK. Navisworks will give you the Save As dialog at this point, and we're going to go to our Lesson 6 folder, into Clash Report, the today's date folder, and then save it in the root directory.
See, that’s saving as type Navisworks NWD. Let's call this one bim361_clash_report_todays_date.nwd. When you use Publish, your file is not saved in the same way as when you use the "Save As" button.
We're still in the NWF file—we're not in the published NWD at this point—and that's a much safer way to do it. If we were to save this as an NWD file and continue working in it, we would then be editing an open NWD file. That would mean all of our links in the selection tree would no longer be active links.
If, for example, the architectural team updated their model, we would not be able to update it in the NWD model. So be very careful that you're not working in an NWD. The NWF is the original; the NWD is the copy.
Let's navigate to the Clash Report folder, today's date, and then we’ll see our NWD file. You can double-click on the NWD file, and your NWD model will open up in Navisworks. You'll see that we’re now in the BIM361_Clash_Report_Todays_Date.nwd, and if we go to Saved Viewpoints, you'll see the clash report viewpoints just as we left them in our Clash Detective.
You can compare what is in your Saved Viewpoints report versus your HTML report. Group 2 corresponds with Group 2 here. So not only can I have a larger image of what I’m talking about in my clash report, but I can see that image in 3D. I can turn on the grids and have a better understanding, if I need to update this, where this pipe is lying.
I’ve seen it’s on Gridline C. The bottom line is that if you use the NWD clash report with the HTML clash report, then you're going to have a much better way of describing the clashes with the trades. When you're done viewing the NWD, you do not need to save. You haven't made any changes to the original model, and if you go back to your Navisworks NWF model, then nothing that you’ve done in the NWD will have affected it. That concludes clash reporting.
I hope you enjoyed this section.