Today we launch Industry Collections, it's a new way of thinking about how to access software and is a perfect fit for construction. Based on a term license they allow you to easily scale up and down during the course of a construction project and include contingent employees in software planning.

So what does the new AEC Collection include? And what advantages do each of these offerings bring to my construction project?

• AutoCAD, verticals, and AutoCAD 360 Pro – As a common platform used throughout the industry, this suite of AutoCAD products allows you to access and create documentation and share detailing with all partners on the project team
• Revit – The leading BIM tool to create construction parts, access schedules and convert designs to fabrication parts for coordination
• AutoCAD Civil 3D – The best tool for road, rail and earthworks detailing, cut and fills, landscaping and getting to machine control
• Navisworks Manage – Create federated models from over 50 file formats and run Clash Detection, Construction Simulation, Quantification, Design Review and Rendering
• Vehicle Tracking – For analysing site movements in advance and ensuring trucks, cranes and large vehicles can move around site
• 3DS Max – For those high end visualisations to help with winning planning, buy in from stakeholders, or winning tender bids
• Formit 360 Pro – A conceptual design tool for buildings that links to Revit that allows you to create site layouts on the PC or mobile device
• Infraworks 360 – A conceptual design tool for infrastructure that links to Civil 3D that allows you to create construction site layouts, traffic simulations and visualisations
• Insight 360 – Run sustainability analysis and verify that any significant changes in materials you make won't affect the end result
• Recap 360 Pro – Use reality capture laser scanning and photogrammetry to better understand existing conditions and verify as built conditions
• Rendering in A360 – Create quick and easy high quality renders and panoramas from Revit and Navisworks
• Structural Analysis – Do easy structural analysis to help with foundation design decisions
• Online Storage – As we work in an 'always connected' world, being able to access models, drawings from office or site

So with an AEC Collection, does my team have everything we need?

Not included in the package but worth considering for construction needs are:

• BIM 360 – A full suite of products built around the needs of a contractor, covering cloud enabled coordination, 3D layout, quality checks, safety programs, commissioning and production planning
• Point Layout – To get coordinate information to total stations seamlessly from the design and review packages and bring back for as built analysis to speed up and reduce rework
• Stingray – To 'gamify' 3D construction project data to improve understanding and health and safety on site

Want to know more? Read this FAQ and contact your reseller for more information about Industry Collections, how to get hold of them, and introduce new workflows to your firm.

It's been 25 years this summer since I was first turned on to the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) as the "holy grail" of design visualization in architecture, thumbing through inspirational musings and essays published in magazines like Cadence and Cadalyst (yes, they were printed on real paper in 1991!). Indeed, VR took hold of many an imagination about that time, as popular media glimpsed into bleeding-edge work by pioneers in research labs like MIT's Media Lab and the Human Interface Technology Lab ("HIT Lab") at the University of Washington. Sadly, VR failed to live up to the hype as it rarely breached the Ivory Tower and into common industry use, and interest in VR largely waned after the 90's like so many Beanie Babies.

That's not to say there weren't valiant attempts to embrace VR in architecture and construction: for decades, VR has captured the imagination of creative professionals seeking the ultimate experience for design and creation. Unfortunately, those visionaries were saddled with limitations like prohibitively expensive technology, strained workflows for content development, clunky interfaces, an infantile internet, and the lack of clear business cases – keeping a lid on any industry enthusiasm for VR for far too long.

Indeed, VR can be thought of as a natural extension or evolution of BIM: immersing designers, creators, and their customers into an environment as the ultimate medium for conveying a concept as spatial experience. While BIM and other media can represent the characteristics of a space, VR can convey the experience of a place. To paraphrase Michael Abrash of Oculus, the immersion, interaction, and intuitive interfaces offered by VR will ultimately require participants to suspend belief, reminding themselves that they are not, in fact, experiencing reality.

So VR is back, and promising that it has changed, and really means it this time. But, will VR last? Maybe so, at least in B2B and professionally, if not for consumers. This time around, the tools are better, the processes and workflows are in place, and popular culture has never seemed more ready to accept wearing computing devices and displays (That said, with apologies to Mark Zuckerberg, grandmothers on Facebook may not be willing to strap a phone on their face to interact with their grandchildren for another 25 years). And with the one-button export from Revit BIM content to VR experience enabled by Autodesk LIVE and Autodesk Stingray, the barrier of entry low enough that every architect, engineer, contractor, and owner can harness the power of VR as easily as they can watch a YouTube video.

The use cases are there for VR as well. No doubt, VR can differentiate you from your competition today. VR can accelerate your design process. VR can inspire confidence in your vision. VR can help communicate your plan. VR can help train your labor force. VR can help you understand what you are buying.

As an industry of professionals specializing in the design and construction of a physical, spatial environment, we are uniquely suited to master this new(ish) virtual, spatial environment. VR and AEC go together like hand-in-Data-Glove. What are you waiting for?  

Great news, we have an update to the COBie exporters for Navisworks now released. One of the biggest requests we had was to support colours from the COBie spreadsheets this is now available.

To learn more about the tool, look at our original article announcing the launch of the COBie for Navisworks tool. Links to the latest installers to download are available below, or in the previous blog.

CobieExtensionSetup_Manage2016.zip

CobieExtensionSetup_Simulate2016.zip

CobieExtensionSetup_Manage2017.zip

CobieExtensionSetup_Simulate2017.zip

CobieExtensionSetup_Manage2018.zip

CobieExtensionSetup_Simulate2018.zip

Sample_Data_Files.zip

Videos of key workflows

We have also got some online videos of key workflows to supplement the Autodesk COBie Extension Quick Start guide which is avaialble in the zip file with the installers, this video playlist shows the following workflows

• Creating templates for ArchiCAD and Revit files
• Configuring Data Drops
• Export to Excel (SQL in the same menu)
• Filtering Values
• Highlighting Objects
• Import Supplier information
• Add data back to the model using iConstruct or DataTools   
• 
  

Feedback

What do you think? Is it missing a vital piece of functionality? Or do you just want to give us positive feedback? Let us know on Navisworks-COBie@autodesk.com

It's always better when someone else tells your story for you right? Well recently BAM Construction UK shared how they worked with the team at Autodesk to do just that. Their story tells how they used Navisworks Quantification as part of their BIM workflows to make things better, so we thought it would be good to share that with you here.

"Reporting quantities using Navisworks means there are no surprises. And no surprises translates into more cost certainty and reduced risk for our client."

Mark Taylor, Digital Construction Manager at BAM Construction UK, tells us how they quickly develop cost plans and eliminate the need for external estimating parties using Navisworks. 

After BAM started using Navisworks in 2012, they quickly realised how to collaborate more efficiently with clients, helping manage costs in a more productive and proactive manner. One of BAM's first uses of Navisworks for quantification was for the construction of a new school building for Royds Hall Community School in Huddersfield. The £6M project provides space for an additional 420 primary school children in West Yorkshire, England. BAM was responsible for both the design and construction of the building, using BIM (including Revit) for its design in combination with Navisworks for quantification, project coordination, clash detection, and construction planning. This collaboration allowed the team to react very quickly to their client's needs. As revisions and change orders could be quickly incorporated into the design model, the combination created "a win-win situation all around.

BAM Construct UK is a leading construction and property company in the U.K., providing a range of services including design, services engineering, construction, facilities management, and property development.  For more about BAM, visit their website to learn about how to create and maintain better buildings.

Read the full story about utilising Navisworks for quantification.

BIM 360 Field is offering a great way to track data on the building suite using your iPad, e.g. the status and install dates of certain equipment. But what if you want to see this data in Revit? 

The answer is pretty simple - the new BIM 360 Plugin for Revit gives you a very easy way to sync the equipment properties in Field with your originally shared Revit model:

After opening the Revit Model, go to Add-Ins > BIM 360 Equipment Properties and chose the model you want to sync with. In this window you will see all your models available in BIM 360 Glue and you will need to select the one corresponding with your currently open Revit Model. You can recognize the Models with shared Equipment Sets on the orange icon: 

Once the properties have been synced, you will get the following message: 

Now that your Field Properties have been added to your Revit Model, you can see them among the object properties: 

Of course, you can use the properties in schedules or in filters - in this case, we used the value for Functioning (Funktionsfähig) to create a view showing all lights colored according to whether they are working correctly (=green) or if they are defective (red). 

To learn more about BIM 360 please have a look at the BIM 360 website and visit our online help for BIM 360 Glue and BIM 360 Field. 

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:

1. Global Options – selecting the 'Revit_IFC' loader

   

2. 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)

   

3. 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.

The Statoil Pilot Project – A Success Story with Construction Technology

Skanska, one of the world’s most successful project development and construction firms, has been implementing BIM on projects around the world for many years. By utilising state of the art construction technology, they have been improving communication amongst project stakeholders, saving time, reducing budget, increasing efficiency and limiting risks.

When it comes to the implementation of BIM on Skanska projects, one country stands out with its strong and successful bond with BIM 360: Norway! Skanska Norway’s relationship with Autodesk has born through the implementation of BIM 360 Field during construction of one key project in 2011. The Statoil Building, seen above, was inspired by Mikado sticks.  It has spectacular architectural features, designed with five column-free shells that are three floors high.  The impressive building, completed with the help of BIM 360 Field, spans over nine floors and 67.000 square meters. After so much success on this project, Skanska Norway made BIM 360 an essential dynamic tool for new projects throughout the region.

Safety, of course, is a top priority for Skanska Norway.  In order to keep construction risks to a minimum, they use BIM 360 Field for safety and tidiness inspections. Using BIM 360 Field has been helping them detect and fix potential safety issues before they arise.  Just ask Project Manager Kristin Ingebrigtsen.  She says “we have addressed many issues in advance of construction which helps us save significant time and budget by detecting issues before they escalate. BIM 360 Field has helped us to capture the building site documentation during the entire construction process."

To know more about how BIM 360 Field helped Skanska complete this challenging project within a tight schedule and budget, check out how construction management technology helps Skanska succeed.

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to provide an update for SmartPlant 3D (.vue) file format support in  Navisworks.

On Friday we published updates to the 2016, 207 plugins and published a new 2018 version of this popular plugin for Navisworks.  The update incorporates fixes for some customer reported issues, as well as bringing the loader in line with the latest version of Navisworks.  The plugin is available to all Navisworks customers with an active subscription (which must be associated with your Autodesk ID to allow downloads – speak to your account admin if you can’t access), and is available with immediate effect.  More detail is available on the app store.

Here are the direct links to the Navisworks app store:

Navisworks App Store Home Page: https://apps.autodesk.com/NAVIS/en/Home/Index

SmartPlant 3D (.vue) apps: https://apps.autodesk.com/NAVIS/en/List/Search?isAppSearch=True&searchboxstore=NAVIS&facet=&collection=&sort=&query=smartplant+3d

Please feel free to take a look and as always, we look forward to your feedback. Thanks and enjoy this release.

For those that follow me on social media you may have seen we've been trying out something a bit different to get news to you about tips, tricks, news and information about products in the form of a YouTube channel. The European team of technical specialists has set up a YouTube channel named 'Autodesk AEC Bar' where we talk about products for Architecture, Engineering and Construction, and industry topics typically more focused towards Europe and answer your questions, industry and technical.

We've posted around 20 videos up till today and aiming to get at least one a week out. So far the most popular video has been myself and previous Beyond Design blogger, Paul Walker, currently a Product Manager for BIM 360, discussing the workflows between BIM 360 Glue and Navisworks and how they can be complimentary to an overall coordination strategy. Watch it below: -

If you want to subscribe to the channel head to the AEC Bar YouTube channel and press Subscribe in the top right corner whilst you're logged into your Google account. And give us feedback!

Denver, what are you waiting for?  The BIM 360 Food Truck is delivering free food, refreshments and prizes to thousands of hungry construction workers in your city and I bet you have some hard-working mouths to feed.  And with all this heat recently, we bet you’re excited for some iced-cold beverages, too.

Local-fave, Bao Chica Bao Bao will be whipping up tasty, mouth-watering meals from the BIM 360 Food Truck during the week of July 25th.  Breakfast or lunch, we’re there to feed your entire construction site for free.  And we think Korean-marinated beef burritos and miso-ginger black bean and roasted corn tacos is just the right way to get those taste-buds rocking.

If your construction team, subs and trades like FREE food, you are the luck.  To get on the list today, nominate your project at bim360.com/feedmycrew. The Top 10 sites on the leaderboard will be selected.  But hurry, the leaderboard locks on July 20th and we come to come see YOU!

Any questions about the BIM 360 Food Truck tour? Visit our BIM 360 blog.