Explore the fundamentals of Autodesk Design Review in the context of Revit Project Management. This article explains how to use this tool, which comes with all Autodesk products, to inspect and manipulate 3D models, navigate through different views, and follow links in designs.
Key Insights
- Autodesk Design Review is included in all Autodesk software packages, and can also be downloaded for free from Autodesk's website. It offers a basic interface to inspect and manipulate 3D models created in Autodesk software.
- The Design Review tool offers a variety of navigation options, including pan, zoom, fit to window, and the turntable tool, which is easier to navigate than the default 3D Orbit tool. The software also includes a List View tab that shows all the views in a model.
- Autodesk Design Review allows users to follow links within the model, making it possible to jump directly from a section or elevation tag to the corresponding section view, level, or sheet. This feature enhances the tool’s utility in reviewing complex 3D models.
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Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video we're going to take a look at Autodesk Design Review. So let's go ahead and open that up.
So I'm going to go to my Start menu, All Programs, Autodesk, and then Autodesk Design Review. This is something that installs with all the Autodesk products, so if you have any of them installed, chances are that you installed it with it. If not, you can go to Autodesk.com and you can download it for free.
So let's go ahead and open that up. Okay, so this is Design Review. It's a pretty basic interface.
So let's go ahead and take a look at the model that we just created. So I'm going to go to the Application menu, Open, and you can see here we've got within our DWF folder, Export, DWF that we created. We've got the model with the date and everything as we created it.
So I'm going to select it and open. And you can see here it takes me to my 3D view. If you remember from our earlier exercises, we were using the section box to kind of chew this up a little bit.
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And so that's the model that we got because that's where we were left off. And so you can see here under the List View tab, it's going to show all the views that we have in our model. So by default on the 3D views, it's going to use the 3D Orbit tool.
I find this one kind of hard to work with, so I typically use the turntable, which is the button just to the right of it. And this one is a little easier to navigate around. It doesn't get all twisted and upside down as easily.
These are going to be your navigation tools. So Home, which was the original view that you started with. Pan, Zoom, either in and out.
Then we have a Fit to Window, which is going to zoom it pretty much to extents. And then of course a Zoom Region, just like any other program that we would use. So over here in the List View, you can see these are all the views that we printed.
So let's go ahead and click on First Floor Plan. If you select that, it's going to take you to the view for your first floor plan. So because we exported all of our views, anytime I hover over a section tag or elevation tag, it gives me this notification that I can control plus click to follow the link.
If I hold down control and click, it will take me to the section view. This also works for our levels. If I hit control click at the level here for second floor, it will take me to that second floor plan.
And the same thing with our sheets as well. If I were to go to my A1.1 First Floor Plan, you can see this is the sheet as it would be printed for a drawing set. So in the next video, we're going to take a look at how we can use the Markup and Measure tools.
And then we'll go ahead and import that back into Revit and work as a team with Digital Redlines.
