Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how Trace provides a safe space to collaborate on drawing changes without fear of altering the existing drawing.
- Learn how markups can be imported and automatically identified as annotations, which can be converted into the drawing as geometry.
- Learn how to import and synchronize PDF markups from Autodesk Docs projects.
Speaker
- Volker CoccoVolker Cocco began using AutoCAD software in 1991 and joined Autodesk, Inc. in 2011. His career began as a technical drafter, and has included roles in CAD management, consulting & training. Volker lives in Troutdale, Oregon, U.S.A
VOLKER COCCO: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this-- actually, I should thank you for viewing this recording of our Autodesk University 2024 session with the longest title ever. Design Changes Using Trace, Markup Import, and Markup Assist in AutoCAD.
Before I begin, I do need to let you know that this presentation may make statements regarding future events and development efforts in our products and services. These statements reflect our current expectations based on what we know today. Our plans are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services, or features, and purchasing decisions should not be made based upon these statements. I'll try to refrain from all that, but take a moment to review that.
OK, a little bit about myself. My name is Volker. I am a-- I've been working with AutoCAD software since 1991 as a Technical Drafter, and later on transitioned to CAD Management. After 1997, I worked for several Autodesk partners as a support specialist, instructor, and consultant, until I joined Autodesk in 2011. I'm currently with the Autodesk Customer Technical Success organization, on the Technical Enablement Team. And I'm based in Portland, Oregon, USA.
All right, all that said, we're going to keep the PowerPoints to a minimum here, but I'm going to briefly talk about our agenda so that I can focus on the demonstration. So we're going to begin with collaboration with a feature called Trace. Trace provides a safe space to provide feedback to a drawing without altering that existing geometry in the drawing. The analogy is of a virtual collaborative tracing paper that is laid over the drawing, that allows collaborators to add markups and comments on the drawing. You can create traces in AutoCAD Web, the AutoCAD mobile app, or AutoCAD desktop. You can then send or share the drawing to collaborators so that they can view the trace and its contents.
We'll follow that up with Markup Import and Markup Assist. Markup Import and Markup Assist use machine learning to identify markups and provide a way to view and insert drawing revisions with less manual effort. Markups can be imported as a PDF, a JPEG, or PNG, and are then overlaid on top of the drawing in the trace environment. Markups in the imported file are automatically identified as text, revision clouds, strikethroughs, and instructions, such as move, rotate, or erase. Markup Assist lets you insert those identified markups into the drawing as annotation or revision clouds, or use the markups to revise existing text and geometry.
Our last demo will be using Markup Import from the Autodesk Construction Cloud, ACC Docs, import and sync those published markups from Autodesk Docs to AutoCAD. In Autodesk Docs, you can add markups to a file, then share the PDF from Autodesk Docs with collaborators who can view the markups in the AutoCAD Trace environment. Because the PDF is continually connected to the AutoCAD drawing, as updates and revisions are made to the PDF markup file in Autodesk Docs, collaborators can see those changes in AutoCAD. So there's a lot of very cool functionality here to help you automate some of the processes that you use in your everyday work environment.
So all that said, let's go ahead and take a look at how these features work. So in AutoCAD, I have blank drawing right now and I'm just going to show you where our tools are. I'm going to go to the Collaborate tab, which I already have open. And you'll see that we have a button here for Traces Palette and one for Markup Import, which is found under Collaborate tab.
If I select Traces Palette, it will open up the palette. And of course, in this case here, it shows that no Traces are in this drawing. But this is what you'd see initially using this Traces Palette. We can also import markups, which we'll talk about shortly.
Having this Traces Palette open, I'm going to go to the middle of the presentation to begin our presentation. And I'll go ahead and open up a drawing that does have some existing Traces. Now, the reason I wanted to show you this is because the first time a user opens up a drawing to which a Trace has been added, this notification bubble will appear in the lower right hand corner of the screen. You can open up the same Palette by clicking on that hyperlink, or you can go to the ribbon in AutoCAD. This drawing has three Traces already included.
And what we're going to do is, we're going to pause here. I'm going to close this drawing. And we'll take a look and see how we can use this in a workflow and then I'll completely explain the Trace Palette and its functionality. To do this, I'm going to switch over to AutoCAD Web. As I mentioned earlier, a Trace can be added using through AutoCAD Web, the AutoCAD mobile app, AutoCAD LT, or an AutoCAD-based application.
Opening that drawing in AutoCAD for web-- it takes a moment to initialize, but you'll see that we have our file here, we have our sidebar, and the Traces bar is available here. The Palette itself is going to look a little bit different and that's OK. It still has that same functionality. We can even add a new Trace here.
Which, if I'm out in the field or I'm someone who is reviewing the work, I don't have access to AutoCAD on my computer. I do have access to the web browser, so I can easily view this drawing and then even make some minor edits. And in this case, I'm reviewing the drawing and I want to make some changes here. I'm going to the Pan command here and we'll slide on over a little bit.
Yeah, so this area right here. This area right here, we're going to be getting rid of it and we're going to put in a Library. So I'm going to go ahead and add a Revision Cloud and a leader with some annotation stating that is the case. Let's go ahead and make sure I've got all the right properties.
So I'm on a markup layer. I've got my text style and leader style set. And zooming in on this a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and add a Revision Cloud. Let's make sure that-- I'll type a for arc. I'm going to go ahead and just pick two points for the arc size. And then I'll go ahead and place that Revision Cloud.
And I totally screwed up. This is an awkward moment because hey, I never created a new trace, did I? That is the first thing I need to do. And awkward moments that I have, like this.
Let's go ahead and click on New Trace and you'll see that we are now in the Trace environment. I'll talk more about this toolbar here shortly, but right now we are in a Trace Edit mode, which means I can create new geometry, which won't affect the existing geometry and you won't even see it unless you are in the Trace environment. So again, I've set all those layers.
I'm going to go ahead and go into the Revision Cloud command, type a for arc length. Then I'll just specify what I feel is appropriate and put a Revision Cloud around this area. Now, I'm going to go and select a multileader, just to put some annotation in here. And this could be anywhere.
Let's go ahead and place it right here. And Remove Future Library. And I'm not going to go into too many details. I could put as much text here as I want but I'm good with this.
And all I have to do now is exit the Trace environment. Once I've done that, the Trace itself disappears. It's saved within this drawing. And I'll go ahead and save the drawing. Once saved, I'll go ahead and exit out of it. And let's go back to AutoCAD. All right.
I'm going to go ahead and open up that same drawing again. I've been notified that some changes were made, some revisions. And because I made the revision myself, I'm not going to get that bubble notification, which is why I wanted to show it to you first. Now, here's the new Trace that I created.
And I should have done this in AutoCAD Web, probably given it a more specific name. So let's call this Library. And either way, just making it a little more descriptive here. And I'm going to go ahead and say, OK, so what did he do? Oh, OK, I need to remove this here. I don't have anything to put in its place because haven't been provided any details, but I will go ahead and erase this.
And to do this, I need to go into a different mode. Now, I'm still in the Trace mode. Now, what I have here is the Edit Drawing or Trace View. This allows me to modify the geometry in the drawing but still remain in this Trace environment. And what's cool about this is that going to the Erase command, if I select objects to erase here, I just want to get rid of all of this. I can put a window around all of this and--
Oops, big mistake I always make. You'll see we're in paper space right now, right? Well, I need to be a model space. Yeah, I'm a CAD geek. I make mistakes, but I'm not going to this time.
I'm still in the Trace environment I'm in model space view. And I'm going to go ahead and put a window around this. And you'll see that kind of fades out and I erase it. But it did not erase the Revision Cloud because it's part of the Trace. So because I've removed this, maybe I want to leave an indication that I've erased existing stuff in the drawing and I have nothing to put here.
So I'm going to go ahead and copy the Revision Cloud and the Trace object itself to the AutoCAD drawing. So I have to do this from the command line. I'm going to type COPYFROMTRACE. That is the command. And I'll go ahead and select these two items. And if I exit the Trace environment, they are now part of the geometry that's in the drawing itself. So we've been quickly able to add those same notes.
So let's take a look at this. I'm going to go into a different Trace right now and you'll see that it moves automatically to the location of that Trace. What we have here-- I've already said this. The Trace environment which we're in, This will take us into an editing mode. Here we have on the toolbar the person who authored the Trace that I'm working with right now.
And here we have a gear icon, which allows me to change the appearance of objects in the drawing. So the Trace overlay, I can fade in or out, and the geometry I can make more prominent or have it appear less prominent in the drawing. And it's all up to you how you want to visualize this. And in some drawings you may need to do a little more of the transparency or less of it, depends.
I can move this Settings dialog anywhere on the screen And then I can pin it to where it will always be available, in case I need to modify on the fly. I'm going to unpin that right now though, and it disappears.
So I'm in a Trace created by my colleague, [INAUDIBLE]. Any Trace that someone else has created, I can't do anything with. If I go into Erase and try to select these objects, you'll see the little X there that shows I can't modify this. It's not my Trace.
However, I can contribute to it. So I know for a fact that what particular sliding glass door should be placed here. So I'm going to go ahead add a multileader. And I'll just go ahead and type in something like that-- See Catalog.
Ah, let's just make up an item number here. SK-2K24-10. Just for grins, I've added that to the Trace. Having done that, I'm going to go ahead and exit that Trace. And now you'll see that instead of just the one avatar here-- I'm kind of in the background. But hovering over this, it shows who created the Trace and who it was last modified by, showing both the users names.
That same information, by the way, is available also from the Trace toolbar. Hovering over it, it shows me who last modified that. And by right mouse clicking, I can close the Trace, rename it. I can even delete it or just remove my contribution. Again, I can't remove the original contributor's name unless I delete the entire Trace. So that is--
Actually, one more step here. That's one part of the coolness of Trace. If I go into this particular Trace I created earlier, Trace is not limited to just working with lines or working with annotation of some type. You can add blocks to a trace which can then be used as a reference or even be inserted into the drawing.
So this Trace has a block, a chair block. And we'll go ahead and move that. The note here is to add to chair 8 and update all chairs in this section with the same name. OK well, instead of getting out of this and just adding that chair, I'm going to go ahead and go into my drawing mode. And again, I'll type COPYFROMTRACE. And I'll go ahead and select that chair, I'll hit Enter, and I'm going to exit the Trace.
And so I've quickly added that same block. And then I can use the BReplace command to maybe update the rest of the chairs. So that is Trace. It's a very cool bit of functionality. You don't have to use the web. AutoCAD Web is a great tool if you don't have AutoCAD available, but you could use AutoCAD LT, or any AutoCAD application that has Trace in it. I believe they all do.
So continuing on, let's take a look at Markup Import and Markup Assist, one of my favorite features in AutoCAD. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my layout. I'll close the Trace dialog. And zooming to Expense, I've been told that-- I've been sent a PDF that has some markups in it. It doesn't have to be a PDF. It could have been a JPEG or PNG file. It has the markups.
In the past when I was drafting, I'd look over the sheet of paper. OK, there's a red line there. And I'd go ahead and make those markups. And with all the revisions my engineers would give me, I soon get whiplash, right? So now, we have everything as a heads-up design.
And with this heads up design, that is part of this Markup Import and Markup Assist, which brings up this dialog and allows me to select either the PDF or PNG or JPEG. I'm going to go ahead and doubleclick it. And it goes on to process and check out what's in that PDF. And it prompts me to either accept, move. If it's not properly aligned, which is not often the case, I can use any of these options or even undo the initial part of this task.
One thing I want to point out is, this is the title block right here that I am working with in this sheet. But the page, these markups, were actually printed using a different sheet. So it's the same drawing, but a different sheet that it was printed from. It doesn't have to be the same one. So this title block indicates that there's a difference. I'm going to accept this.
I'm in the Trace environment. And I'm going to just zoom in on this a little bit, and I'm going to click Drawing. And as soon as I click the Trace view or Edit Drawing mode, you'll see that we have some dashed borders appearing around the markups that were in that PDF. So anytime I hover over one of these, it will tell me what that markup was identified as.
So in this case, it's identifying text. And believe me, this is pretty-- this is my crappy text, OK? Very hard for even myself to read. So it's pretty impressive that we are able to identify this text.
We also have other options here. For example, here's Remove. So Remove is an action item. It's like Erase or Delete and AutoCAD will detect that. And so I hover over this and it says Remove, Click for options.
If I click on this or hover over the dashed line that's in here, Markup identifies this as an instruction. Click to start the Erase command. That's pretty intelligent. I mean, you can do-- there's a rotate and copy and move action as well.
I'm going to click on this. It prompts me to select the objects I want to remove. And I did blow it again. Yes, this is me, Volker. Awkward moments. I was in paper space. I do need to again go to a model view because I want to erase or remove the objects in there.
So I'm going to click on this line work here again. And I'm just going to go ahead and put a window around this. And it fades out the action that I just performed, and it's also faded out the section that I erased. Now, again, that may not be that apparent. But if we click on the gear icon here, you'll see that some additional options have been added to this Palette, and specifically for Markup.
So we can change the transparency of what we want to see, that the action was applied to. We can also change the Faded Markup transparency. So we can have that appear or even fade more. We also have options to set a current annotative style and multileader style. And you can actually go into the style dialog from this button here, to either create a new text or MLeader style, or set a different one current. Anyway.
Now, I've removed that. I've removed that. And let's take a look. Whoops. Actually, let's take a look at this right here. If I click on this, and I'm on the proper layer, I'm going to go ahead and select that. And it recognizes this as a Revision Cloud. I have two options, Convert this to a revision cloud-- Rectangular Revision Cloud or Polygonal. For this one, I'll use Rectangular and it just creates that Revision Cloud on the fly.
At the same time, up here I have this text. I'm going to go ahead and select on it. And it shows me what text is here. Although, I have three different boxes for text, right? I can insert this text as a multileader. I can insert it as just MText. I can Update Existing Text by adding additional information here. I can also copy this to the clipboard.
What I want to do is combine all three of these and that's what this button is for, Select markup text to add. So I'm just going to go ahead and select it in the order I want to add this text and it recognizes all of it. Which is-- again, this is very bad printing on my end. But it has recognized that text.
And I'll go ahead and just clean this up a little bit. And let's actually do this. And now I want to go ahead and insert that as a multileader. I'm just going to pick a point here. And actually, I can plop that right over there. And voila. I've quickly made those changes.
Now, we have this here. AutoCAD is identifying this as a markup, but it doesn't know what to do with it. So if I click-- and also note these are black here, as opposed to the blue boundaries we had earlier. So if I click on it, it gives me the option to fade these markups. So I can leave them there. There's they're just markups. But I don't need to see them right now.
So let's take a look at this area here. There's a markup here as well. So first of all, we have again, a revision cloud. And this time I'll use polygonal. And you can see, we have a bit of a variation there.
This item here is a comment that was made in Adobe Acrobat. And if I click on it, it will show me that it is text. And I'm going to go ahead and just make a change here because that's a little outdated. And I'll insert this as multiline text, because I don't really know what to do with this right now, but I may want to get rid of that Trace. So I'm just going to change-- just add that annotation there.
This is probably one of my favorite features right here for Markup Import and Assist. Again, we have text. But I'm going to replace this text with this text here and this room tag with this text here. So I'll go Update Existing Text. And it prompts me to select the drawing text to replace, which I'm going to go ahead and just select that room tag. And I could do a strikethrough, but I'm going to replace it.
All right. So it's done that. So what's really cool about this is that-- I'm going to double click on this. This isn't just text, it's attribute data. So that's pretty powerful. And I love this. I wish it were available when I was doing drafting.
But all this is-- that's it. It's pretty easy to work with and will really improve productivity in your drafting process. So that is Markup Import and Assist.
So let's take a look at Markup Import for ACC Docs. Now ACC Docs, of course, is an online storage and document management system that is part of your subscription. And this works a little bit different than the Markup Import and Assist. In fact, it's a little bit limited. But things continually improve with the import of your red lines through Markup Import and Assist.
And now we're also going to go ahead and we've started working a little bit with ACC Docs. So in this case here, in my project, I'm going to mark up a PDF which, of course, is always going to be associated with the drawing that that PDF belongs to. And let's open that up. The one thing you have to remember here is that when you are adding markups in a PDF in Docs is that those markups are not embedded in the PDF there, they're associated with ACC Docs. So they're linked.
You get some nice markups and everything, but it is one of the reasons we haven't fully implemented this at this time. We're working on it. But I'm going to go ahead and put a Rev Cloud around this area. And then I'm going to go ahead and put a callout, just like I did previously.
And let's go ahead and scooch that maybe over here. I'll add some text. And I'll do remove. Remove. So let's do it this way. To-- gotta learn how to type here, sorry-- be replaced.
Ah, coffee bar. I need coffee. All right, so we're just going to go ahead and keep that. I'm going to go ahead and publish this. And now, the beauty of Docs is that I can give permissions, the type of permissions I want for collaborators to work on the drawing project. They can either view, edit, do other things as well. And what I want to do now is, I'm going to go ahead and sync markups to AutoCAD. And I'm going to notify the members of my team that I've made some revisions that they need to be aware of. I have a small team. It's just me and my clone. And I'm going to go ahead and just CC myself and send this to my clone.
[INAUDIBLE]. And could put more stuff here but think you get the idea. I could type a long letter if I wanted to. And once I've gone ahead and put in the information I need, I'm going to go ahead and click Send. And this actually works really fast because-- whoops. I actually did not-- go ahead and close that guy and open up my other email client. Sorry about that.
So I've already received an email now from the Autodesk Construction Cloud, which tells me that. I have a markup available. And I'm going to go ahead and double-click on this here. Not double-click, just click on it, to launch the drawing and see what markups were made available.
Before I do that, I want to point out that This functionality uses the AutoCAD AC launcher, which is basically the default for when you install AutoCAD. It's going-- which also means that whatever AutoCAD application I used last, that is what it's going to attempt to open.
If you have both, and you probably won't, but be aware anyway. If you were to have, say, AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD both installed on your system, or AutoCAD and AutoCAD Architecture, it's going to open up whichever one of those applications you used last. If you do not have AutoCAD installed at all, but you remember this project, it's going to open up the prompt to sign in to the AutoCAD Web application and open the drawing that way.
I'm going to go ahead and click Import and connect to markup. I do not need to have the drawing open. It's going to open up that drawing for me and prompt me to import the markup. So it takes a moment because it is processing the changes that were made to the PDF.
Once that is done, it shows me the markup. And again, we have the option to accept. Again, we are in the Trace environment. I'm going to accept it. So that worked perfectly. Except what? Hey, where's my Revision Cloud?
There's a reason for that. This was not an awkward moment by me. I'm going to go ahead and close this. The reason that occurred is because, unlike the callout which I published, I did not publish the Revision Cloud. Oops, my bad. My mistake. I may have forgotten, whatever. You may have this happen, which is why I'm pointing it out. It's very important to click on the Publish option.
Once you've done that, AutoCAD is still synced with this particular PDF. And I'm just going to go ahead and close and save this here. I'm going to pretend I didn't know that was happening. And go to my start tab and I'll open up that drawing again.
And I don't really receive a notification. I could have sent myself a notification email. Oops, there it is. But I do get the bubble here for the markup, New markups were added. Again, we're synced with Docs. So again, it processes that and brings the markup in. So very cool stuff.
Yeah, can't tell you for sure, but you we're always improving and adding more functionality. This is our venture into markups with ACC Docs and AutoCAD. So it's very cool stuff. I love it. I use Docs quite a bit nowadays. It's a great storage environment. And this is a very cool bit of functionality. And of course, those markups, by going out of the Trace environment, will disappear as well because they are in the Trace.
The one thing I do have to note. Again, there is different functionality here. So because this is from Docs and because I pointed out earlier that it's associated with Docs, we cannot bring these into the drawing like we did with the Revision Cloud and annotations that I used in the previous examples. You'll see that the border is outlined as black. So this indicates that all we can really do is fade these markups after we've made changes in the drawing.
So that is the current limitation. But hey, this, I'm sure-- can't promise anything, but I'm sure this is just going to improve. All that said, I really hope that this has helped. This is the end of my presentation.
And don't forget to download the PDFs and handouts. Let me back up for one moment. I didn't show this slide earlier. Download the PDF handout for all the details about these three topics that I spoke about. You'll also have data sets available that you can use to try out these features. So thank you very much for your time. I know you're busy so I certainly hope that the time you spent watching this recording will be of benefit.
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