Hands-On AutoCAD Plant 360 Collaboration

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: All right. Well, welcome to AU. I'm not sure when everybody got in. Some of you might've gotten in yesterday, some of you might've gotten in early this morning, but it's time to get started. Enjoy all the fun the rest of the week. So thank you for attending this class. So what we're going to talk about today is Plant 3D 2018 with the addition of collaboration and able to push Plant projects, P&ID projects, up to the cloud using BIM 360 Team. How many people are actively using Plant 3D? Can I get a show of hands? Is there anybody who hasn't used Plant 3D? Great.

KENNETH FAUVER: We need to fix that.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Ken will be visiting you later. All right. So some general notes before we get started. So we're going to try to go through the lab and I'm going to be doing the demo on it-- on what we're actually going to be doing. Ken Fauver over here is my co-presenter and then we also have some gentlemen in the back of the room that are going to be our lab assistant. So if you have any questions or if you get stuck doing something just raise your hand, and they can come over and help you. So let me go onto the next slide.

All right, so a little bit about myself-- do some general introductions. My name is Quentin Contreras. I have worked for Autodesk going on about six years now. I started off on doing frontline support. That was basic support mainly focusing on Plant 3D, P&ID. I've been using Autodesk products probably 25, 20 years now, so been around.

My main focus although is in the oil and gas industry. I've done some ammonia refrigeration work as well, mainly with P&IDs. So that's a little bit about me. Ken, I'll let you introduce yourself.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah, I'm Ken Fauver. I've been with Autodesk for about 6 and 1/2 years. Came here from industry-- working in the petrochemical industry actually out of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana area. And started off in Autodesk as a technical cell specialist and now I'm in the consulting. So I get-- I'll get to see a lot of you probably along the way, after this class helping out in the consulting realm of things. But I won't bore you with any more of the details, you can read up there. So.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: And also some of you that probably initially signed up to the class, when everything first came able to be registered, Scott Hallmark was scheduled to teach this class and I was going to be his co-presenter. Scott had some family stuff that came up unfortunately, so I'm stepping in to fill his shoes. Hopefully, I don't disappoint him and I do a good job on his lab. So if you have any complaints come to me, don't come to Scott. So let's go ahead and get started with what we're going to be doing.

So collaboration. So I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with using BIM 360 Team, like I said, it's a new feature that's available with 2018. So typically with a Plant 3D project in the-- up until now anything that you wanted to work on with a large group of members you're going to be using a SQL Server type setup to where you're going to be having a SQL administrator, who's going to be managing it for you. You're going to have your IT department, who's going to be working with you as well. So it gets a very, very convoluted with all the people that are involved in making a project and helping you get through it.

I mean-- and it's really difficult sometimes because you've got to turn to those people if you run into issues, which can be in downtime on you working with your project to coordinate with them sometimes. So the one thing good with collaboration is that all of this is pushed to the cloud. So there's no need for IT management really to manage that project through SQL or even maybe possible through Vault as well if you all-- some of you all are using Vault.

So this is giving you those capabilities without the SQL Server that you would normally have or without using Vault like you might be using as well. So there's advantages to that in that you have a little bit more control of what's happening. And also you have a little bit more-- to invest some of your money into other areas because you're not having to use that monetary value on getting those people to work.

So some of the key points I wanted to put here was you can-- projects are accessible through the cloud server anywhere, anytime. So that means that if you're here at AU right now and you're wanting to work, which unfortunately happens sometimes, you can get online through BIM and work on your project. You're not tied down to having to go back to your office and work with Plant 3D there.

It has to look and feel of Vault, if any of you have used Vault before. So basically you're going through and accessing the project, you're pulling down, you're checking out, you're checking back in drawings. That's essentially how it's working for those of you that are familiar with that workflow. Like I said, it's used a lot-- utilizing BIM 360 Team, so all of that's online. So it's just normally going to your web browser, pulling up BIM and you can look at your project there.

The other advantage of that as well is that you can work collaboratively with people out in the field as well. So if they have their tablet, their phone available they can pull up those Plant drawings, P&ID drawings. Look at them there and also do any type of editing, note-taking. Push those back up to the cloud, you'll be notified if you're administering the project, and you can see what changes or notes are added to that. And then the also thing is the markups that are available through that as well.

So that's the nutshell of what we're going to be doing and what I wanted-- we wanted to be able to demonstrate for you today is how to do that? What's involved? And get into the basics of it, that way it gives you the familiarity of what you would be doing with this type of project.

So I'm going to go ahead and switch computers right now and we can go ahead and go through the demo. One thing before we get started as well, do all of you all have a green card that was by your computer? If anybody doesn't, let me know. So you are going to be using that as we get started to get access to BIM. All right, just give me a couple of minutes. Let me switch over.

So yeah-- let's go ahead and get started on what you're actually going to be doing. And I was mentioning that those green cards, so those green cards are going to be used for the login purposes of BIM. Normally through BIM-- if you're not a BIM user right now and you want to try this when you get back to the office, BIM does allow you to have a 30 day free trial. So when you get back and you want to try this on your own, then that's probably one of the avenues that you can have to do that, not unless you're going to be making the move to purchase BIM as well.

So what we need to do first is-- let's go ahead and open Plant 3D here, if you haven't already. So when you're here in Plant 3D you want to go up here to the top, some of them shouldn't-- probably look not signed in, so it probably should say sign in up here. And this is where you want to go and go ahead and sign in, so you're going to go-- let me go ahead and sign out and show you how to go through that process.

So here you want to go ahead and sign into an Autodesk account. So with the email address, that's going to be the one that's located at the very top that says BIM 360 Team username. It should start out with an AU and a dash and each of those cards should have an individual number that you're going to be typing in there and then at Autodesk.com. All right, is there anybody who still is having any issue signing in? Raise your hand.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] install. How does it work?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Ken.

AUDIENCE: Sorry.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Carson's heckling me again. What's that? What you need?

KENNETH FAUVER: We got somebody over here who needs help. Right over here.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Go ahead and continue on a little bit-- so you should have gone through that sign in process with asking you for the email address and the password. So the next thing we want to do is we're going to go over here to the project manager and we're going to open

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

a collaboration project. When you get to this point, you should see the open collaboration project window. And what this is going to show you is this is going to show you all the Plant projects that are here for all the hubs that you would have access to. So this is showing every Plant project that's in here. Now, one of the things that you have to think about here is that this isn't actually a Plant project, per se-- all the settings and everything, all the folders that are associated with a project.

All right, sorry about this. So initially when we said-- and here's one of the cool things about locking people out obviously, you all are all locked out right now. So what initially that we did with this class is that with the green cards that you had, when you go into BIM you'd create it and then you'd add the users. Unfortunately, not all the users were added, so that's why you can't log in right now. Apparently when I go into the hub though it shows me that 50's available-- has been added as a user to BIM.

So for this, let's go ahead and try to use the credentials that you have there, but instead of the number that you have assigned to that card-- everybody try 50 and see if that works. I'm-- we want to try that first, just to get to this first part. So everybody at this point pretty much?

All right. So let's go ahead and go through this and we'll see how far we can get, hopefully we can get through this. All right, so starting off again. So you're going to want to open the collaboration project here. So when you get to this point, here's where you can go ahead and open the number that's assigned to you on that green card. So if you had AU03 this is to be the one that you can get into. So I'm going to go into 44 because that's the card I have associated with mine.

So what's happening here is with me accessing that particular project,

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

it's pulling down everything that's been uploaded for that particular Plant project. So essentially what happened is that when these were created a Plant project was created, it was pushed to the clouds. So now I'm pulling down all the Plant files, folders locally to my machine. So it's syncing down to mine and once it syncs down to my computer, I'm going to have access to that project and be able to check out-- check in drawings.

As it's going through this process you, of course, see the bar there that shows you the status of how much longer you're going to be downloading. You can see the files that are associated, that it's pulling down and it should be finishing up. So now it's setting everything current, pulling down specs, and once that all gets through you should be able to see the number here associated with the actual project that you're in.

All right. So when you get to this point, what we want to do now that we have access to this project is go ahead and get an access or create-- we're actually going to create a Plant 3D drawing here. So you're going to go through the normal process as you would with Plant. So we're going to expand this, obviously there's no drawings in there, and I'm going to go ahead and right click on here, and I'm going to do a new drawing.

For the drawing name you can put anything you want in here, for now it doesn't matter. So I'm just going to name my drawing and go ahead and OK that. Once that drawing is created, you should see it here in the Plant 3D drawings-- and if you've also noticed, like I was mentioning when we first got started, what you're seeing is the same setup if you're familiar with Vault.

So here it's showing me this grey circle with a plus here. So what that is indicating is that drawing that I just created is just local at this point, it hasn't been pushed up to the cloud yet. So that's why the plus is there. So once you get this drawing created here in your Plant 3D drawings, go ahead and just put a-- go ahead to put a vessel in there. Put some piping, maybe put a pump. So just go ahead and get creative and you can do-- just add some items here, that way we can go ahead and check it in. So let me go ahead and-- going to add a vessel here.

KENNETH FAUVER: Show them where the equipment manager is.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: So here I can pull from equipment. If you're not familiar with it this is underneath the home tab-- create equipment, and then I can select vessel here. That's what I want to put in. And then if I want to put in a pump as well, I can pick a different pump.

And if I wanted to route out some pipe I can select here on the vessel with the flange, you'll see this plus mark that's right here. So this-- if I select this and go ahead and pull off, once it gets here, then I can route the pipe, bring it to where I want to and then place my pipe. And then if I wanted to add a pump to here I can go back over here to create equipment, go to pump-- I'll pick up this here. I'll drop it in over here and place into there.

And then if I need to route this to here, one option that I could do is just select here on the node. I can use my Osnap here. Oop, let me [INAUDIBLE] back. And select my node. And it'll go to the auto route to where I can have different options that I could go through and select and go ahead and select that. So here I have a vessel, some pipe routing, some-- a pump for my equipment here. Anybody need any help? Everybody good at this point?

So if you've gone through that process already, this is nothing extravagant when just showing you the process at the BIM part not necessary the Plant part. So once I got the drawing here, I want to go ahead and

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

save my-- what I have here. So I'm going to go ahead and save this. So once again, it's not saving up to the cloud yet. It's only saving locally. So now that I have it-- here that I want it, I'm going to go ahead and save this up to the cloud. So there's a couple-- one of the ways that you can do this is you hover over the drawing here, it's checked in now, so is saving it. There's a little bit of a delay before it actually checks that into the cloud. So it's not something that you saw automatically, right away.

The other option would have been if I would of just right clicked on this, I could have checked it in. So once I'm done with it I can check this in and it's going to show me this window here. So additionally, if I had other drawings I needed to check in as well, you would have seen those listed here. And I could have gone through and check those. So I can go ahead and OK this, this shows me the process of checking in. So it closes the drawing-- as you noticed it-- I don't have the check here, I don't have the plus, so this is no longer an active drawing here in my project. This is strictly being shown here.

So another thing, just to verify that this actually did happen. If I get out of that-- so I'm going to go back over here. So what I did here is I went in through Internet Explorer-- Chrome-- actually I'm using Chrome here-- and when you get there, on your card that you have you can log in to the hub using the AST and then the number that you use and then Autodesk360.com. And then you would use the BIM 360 password that's there in your card as well, to log in here on the hub.

So what this is going to allow you to do is to go in and look at the projects that are located here. So I believe-- so getting over here-- some of you all should have logged in. So I've logged in here to the hub that see that-- I'm able to see all the projects that currently that you all are working in. So here are all the numbers associated to it.

Hopefully-- let's look at one of these and see if any of these got updated. So here for this particular AU17, I could actually go in now through the hub and see what actually-- was-- this person drew. So give that a second, it's pulling up the drawing. So apparently this user here came in and put in this information here. So this is what I was mentioning earlier with the capabilities of being able to share collaboratively, everybody here that's been working so far-- I could pull up everybody's drawing right now and actually see what you're doing. And even if I was out in the field somewhere and I had a tablet on me, I could access them through there as well and see all the individual things here. Question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] when you're attaching other models, do we [INAUDIBLE] attach models that are [INAUDIBLE] project?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah, you want to keep them within the project itself. Is that right, David, with xrefs? Yes, so with the BIM part you're-- the way it's structured right now, that's the way you have to do it. Keep them locally within the project and not--

AUDIENCE: I thought you attaching them [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: I believe what you're going to have to-- what you have to do with xrefs is you're going to have to check it out-- attach it, all right. Now you have it locally, so to refresh that every so often, you're going to have to check it out again. It's just the way it is right now. Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: How are project settings handled?

KENNETH FAUVER: Project settings? Is anybody familiar with Vault? Using Vault with Plant? What it's-- it's going to work similar. Your project is-- gets copied down local, you're going to do whatever work you're going to do to them project settings, and then you're going to check it back in.

AUDIENCE: [? In ?] [? SQL, ?] it's what's different from [INAUDIBLE]?

[? QUENTIN CONTRERAS: ?] Correct. Correct.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yes, correct.

[? QUENTIN CONTRERAS: ?] What was that?

AUDIENCE: When you control [INAUDIBLE] access [INAUDIBLE]?

[? QUENTIN CONTRERAS: ?] To the project settings themselves?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

KENNETH FAUVER: No. Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, yeah.

[? QUENTIN CONTRERAS: ?] All right.

KENNETH FAUVER: Any other?

AUDIENCE: On the update [INAUDIBLE] specs [INAUDIBLE]. How do you make sure [INAUDIBLE] [? spec ?] [INAUDIBLE]?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: There's a couple of ways that you could do that. One of the other options that you're available to use with this-- with the BIM collaboration like it is-- is I'm not familiar if any of you all are using-- what is it, OneDrive?

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

OneDrive on A360 Drive. You can store specs in that location as well, to where--

PRESENTER 1: Catalogs [INAUDIBLE] specs about the [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah, the catalogs. And do it that way to where you can push what you need to push out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] automatically [INAUDIBLE] user [INAUDIBLE] some kind of refresh or anything or does it automatically [INAUDIBLE] enforce that their using the latest and greatest specs?

PRESENTER 1: So specs or catalogs?

AUDIENCE: Specs.

PRESENTER 1: Yeah, so specs are part of the project. So when you as an administrator-- checking the latest spec, it will be uploaded to the cloud as part of that process when you check it in. And then as the synchronization processes happens as part of the project, which happens on a routine, the most common circumstance, it'll be synchronized down to the users and they will be using that.

AUDIENCE: Are you [INAUDIBLE] users to close a section and restart [INAUDIBLE]?

PRESENTER 1: No.

AUDIENCE: How will that [INAUDIBLE]?

PRESENTER 1: There's a-- in the options, which we might go into later-- not sure. In the options there's a routine synchronization that occurs anywhere between five minutes [? all the way ?] up to a manual process.

[? AUDIENCE: ?] [INAUDIBLE] there's a-- you can see that, but it-- I've not seen it work properly [INAUDIBLE] and users still don't see the latest specs [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER 1: Haven't come across that yet in this environment.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: One more question, then we'll get rolling into next thing.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] users with [INAUDIBLE] access [INAUDIBLE]?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: So I know through the BIM part you can go in and set different types of settings for-- there's three different options that you have. And you can restrict users on what kind of access they could have. So that gives you the ability to lock out some of those settings that you don't want them to access.

Let's go into the next part and we'll have time after we get through this for more additional questions. Good questions, by the way. So we're going to go back into Plant here, if you're not there already yet, and the next thing we want to do is we want to work on an AutoCAD Plant project in BIM 360 Team that's already there. So I'm going to go back over here to open collaboration project.

KENNETH FAUVER: Let's go over to the project manager and the pull down and pick open collaboration project.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: So you should see the window here that says open collaboration project, and you're going to be looking for the project name that's located on the bottom of that green card, that's an [? OG 125092-L. ?] And I believe it's the first one So I'm going to select it and then open it. Well, that's not good-- so try number two.

KENNETH FAUVER: The one at the bottom or the one with the test.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: There's a bottom one?

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: OK. Get So this one right under the 50. That one didn't work.

KENNETH FAUVER: I like how it says, "oops." Reprogram it to go, "damn it." Yeah. Had to pick it twice.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I had to pick it twice. Third time, fourth time's a charm I guess.

KENNETH FAUVER: And then you had to hop around on one leg and rub your belly.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I-- you all don't want to see me do that. All right, so once again it's pulling everything down locally to my computer right now. One of the things that-- thinking about this as it's pulling everything down and if you start using this more-- one thing that you can do to speed up the process on how long this is taking sometimes is-- initially when you start a Plant 3D project you're getting all the default specs brought down and are all populating there locally and that's one thing that you could get rid of. If you're not using all of those, just get rid of the ones you're not using prior to pulling it up to the cloud, that way you don't have to deal with some of the added time that might happen here. And if there's any other drawing files or anything else that you might have-- if you're pushing an existing project up to the cloud get rid of those first, clean it all out and then push it up. So it's finalizing here

KENNETH FAUVER: And notice it was downloading specs It downloaded the specs for that project.

AUDIENCE: If you can control what specs are in the project [INAUDIBLE]?

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: So here's where we're going to use your card again. So here with this project pull down now what you want to do is you're going to come over here to your Plant 3D drawings-- over here in your project manager. Once again, I'm going to right click on here and create a new drawing. Now here for the drawing name we want to-- we're going to use the cards. So the card that you were assigned, you should have the AU dash whatever numbers associated with it.

So what you're going to do here by giving it that name is-- so mine would be AU-- that card that I have is 44. So that's the naming convention that everybody needs to use on this because this is going to come into play as we're going through the rest of this. So make sure you use the number and-- so I'm going to go ahead and create that, click OK.

So I have my drawing created here. Also within here there should be some other drawings. There's an AU 50, it seems. And there's an equipment EQP 100, there's a STR 101. So these are already drawings that create-- were created in this collaboration project. So with my drawing open now I want to go ahead and add the equipment and add the structural drawing that's seen here.

So in order to do that I want to go ahead and select-- let's see, which one I want to do first? I'll do the equipment. And another thing that I wanted to point out on here-- here, on the ribbon tab, here you have your collaboration portion of Plant 3D. So if I click on here you can see the different types of options and so forth that are associated with the collaboration. Here I have, share a project. I have check in, check out. And I also have attach.

So what I want to do is I want to attach this equipment into this particular drawing that I just created. So with it being highlighted here I'm just going to go ahead and click attach. And here's the equipment and here I can go ahead and do the structural part as well. Shrink this down, so I can see the rest of the window. And I'm going to go ahead and attach those.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah. And here has given me the option to attach the X reference. How I want to do that? I'm just going to click OK for this instance. So this is what you should be seeing as you bring all this in. So each of you was assigned a number. And if we look at this here, there should be the AU dash and the number that's associated. So I need each of you to do at this point is to find the number that's associated with the card that you have and go ahead and route just a simple pipe from the vessel over to the pump over here. And just the thing that you want to keep in mind and make sure you [INAUDIBLE] is just stay within the boundary of what you have here with your box.

So everybody is accessing this portion of this project and adding their own individual parts. So--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yes, that-- good point. His question was, should we attach it as an overlay, which in most cases that's-- I mean, that's what you're going to be doing. So go ahead and go through that process. If you need any help routing, just raise your hand and somebody can show you. I know we have some newbies in here. So. And let me go ahead and do mine as well.

KENNETH FAUVER: Are those-- are there nozzles under-- is there a nozzle underneath that tank?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I believe there is.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah, that's where you'll be routing from or to.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah, Scott didn't make this easy for us. He made it difficult as possible. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. Scott. All right, so--

KENNETH FAUVER: And you don't have to have those-- that little grid there that you're seeing in there as well is a steel-- you have to turn on the-- change the representation of it if you want to actually see steel. But I wouldn't worry about routing the pipe through it, just get it from the tank to the pump just to-- is the main part of the exercise.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: And just for time's sake and just making sure we get through this exercise, if you can't get everything to connect properly, that's OK for this exercise. All we're simply doing is showing the ability for multiple users to access this project here and be able to add their portion of whatever they're going to be delegated to work with with the project. So that's-- just trying to demonstrate the normal workflow that you would have if you have multiple users working on a project at a particular time. And this isn't limited to just being able to work here within the confines of the room, but this would be somebody on the other side of the US accessing the project as well and being able to do this.

So I think you should be to the point to where you should have something in there right now. So at this point we want to go ahead and say what we have

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

and go ahead and check it in. So I'm going to go back to my collaboration tab here under ribbon at the top and I'm going to go ahead and check the [? sense. ?] So here I can select this. It gives me, once again, the window that we saw earlier, and I'm going to go ahead and OK that. All right, so my drawing is checked in.

Another thing I can do here as well is do a refresh and see just to make sure that everything's there. Once again, you have the same capabilities as you would working with Plant. So if I wanted to go in and create an ISO, I can go in and create an ISO. Orthographic's pretty much the same way as well, if I wanted to go into that process.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] model, does it automatically check in?

KENNETH FAUVER: No.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: No. It's not recommended to do it that way. Yeah, so there's definitely a workflow. And then those of you that are familiar with Vault, you want to make sure that you're checking in drawings and that's the key thing that you need to express to your users all the time-- to follow that workflow. And, I mean it-- sometime-- it should for the most part, but you just don't want to leave normal process. The normal process is to check in, check out.

The other thing that you want to make sure that you're telling your users is that when you get this project up to the cloud, up to BIM, those files shouldn't be touched at all. I mean, everything they're working through is through Plant, they're not working through BIM. So it's confusing when you first get started because you're creating a project in BIM, you're creating a project in Plant. They're not the same per se.

AUDIENCE: Now, if you were playing around-- messing around a bit, BIM allows you to drag and drop drawings into-- there's a folder [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] they're not going to show up [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Right, because they're not part of the Plant project.

AUDIENCE: There's a right way and a wrong way.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Correct.

KENNETH FAUVER: Correct.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: And you can put information in their documents and their to manage that as well as you're working through. But anything that's drawing related, that's associated to the models, you have to use that process through Plant and push it and push it back.

KENNETH FAUVER: Think is-- think of BIM-- the cloud as being Windows Explorer, if you will. You wouldn't go out-- you can't go out to the network and just double click on a file and open it up in Plant. You got to go through the project manager on everything.

AUDIENCE: Now, is there a [INAUDIBLE]? Is there going to be a way to have the project manager support [INAUDIBLE], so you can-- if you bring in a [INAUDIBLE] model up, you click on it, it'll actually launch the [INAUDIBLE] of the [INAUDIBLE]?

KENNETH FAUVER: I'm not sure.

AUDIENCE: Because right now, you have to actually [INAUDIBLE]--

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah. Right.

AUDIENCE: --make your changes, close, and then [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Right, right. To be honest with you, I doubt that something like that is going to happen because they would have to-- Advanced Steel is Advanced Steel, Plant 3D is Plant 3D. You don't want to have to-- you don't want your structural people to have Plant 3D and launch-- be able to launch an Advanced Steel through it. It's just a--

AUDIENCE: A lot of times, the structural people are [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Well, I know that, but I-- they're two different-- they're two separate things and there would be some serious development work that would have take place there to make it happen.

AUDIENCE: Here's our problem. The piping guys constantly [INAUDIBLE] Advanced Steel models. So they need have access to the live Advanced Steel models, constantly, because they're working in the same projects [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: But they're not actually editing in those steel models are they?

AUDIENCE: They need to be able to reference them.

KENNETH FAUVER: But they can. Now what they have to do to reference those models is they have to pull them into the project manager. And then they can reference them to their models and create orthos using and the ortho. But that's all you should be able to do through plant anyway. You don't want to be able to open up Advanced Steel.

AUDIENCE: 360 as well?

KENNETH FAUVER: Huh?

AUDIENCE: That'll work?

KENNETH FAUVER: Yes.

AUDIENCE: The 360.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 360 [INAUDIBLE]?

KENNETH FAUVER: I'm sorry.

AUDIENCE: I'm not seeing the [INAUDIBLE] in 360 viewer. Is that because it was the overlay or [INAUDIBLE]?

KENNETH FAUVER: That's--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Did you-- is it-- double check that it's actually [? xref'd. ?]

AUDIENCE: It's actually [INAUDIBLE] overlay [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Same thing.

KENNETH FAUVER: You have the same thing?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: So did you-- did you-- you opened up the AU new model and you're not seeing it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Hey, Quentin, open up that-- open up your model in viewer.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: In Plant, Ken, or here in [INAUDIBLE]?

KENNETH FAUVER: In BIM-- I mean, A360. We're having some users that are trying to look at the model through and it probably is because it's overlay. And I want to check that for sure because I did notice that Quentin attached his-- attached his is that an overlay it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] and I attached it.

KENNETH FAUVER: Did you?

AUDIENCE: Which I was wondering about. [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Well, sure. So you noticed that a reference-- go ahead. I'm sorry, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] .

KENNETH FAUVER: The references aren't showing up in the viewer.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah. Are they just coming in as text or nothing at all.

AUDIENCE: Nothing at all.

KENNETH FAUVER: It's nothing-- is all you seeing is pipe.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

Yeah, see, it's just pipe.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

Yeah, so is anybody able to see the equipment and the pipe all together when you go in through BIM or did you use overlay or did you use--

AUDIENCE: Overlay.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Overlay. And you all aren't able to? I'll look at that. Maybe. I mean--

KENNETH FAUVER: He is attached and he can't see it either.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah and it might be a thing-- there's a lot of people hitting this right now, so it might've not all updated as it is right now.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

KENNETH FAUVER: That's [? another ?] issue-- that you can't see the xrefs?

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah, there actually is and I don't have my information with me right now, but I'm also going to be teaching another-- I'm going to be doing a lecture on this as well on Thursday and I have that included in my presentation.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah and with a lot of the Autodesk products right now that are using up to the cloud right now, it's a concern and every-- it's understandable. But there are precautions, there are measures that we have in place. And like I said, I can get you some more information on that.

AUDIENCE: One of our clients, they specify [INAUDIBLE] unplug from the internet [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: David said that non-issue that you can't see the xrefs in the viewer.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Oh, OK. And one of the things that you have to understand and be patient with a little bit is that-- this is the first push out of using these capabilities with Plant, teaming up with BIM and using this. So you guys right now, you all are on the cusp of trying this out, using it. Granted, there might be some slight issues here and there, but as you come upon those type of issues and you do get back to us-- if you have the ability to submit support request or reach out to Autodesk do that because that's the only way that the product's going to get better. It's going to be more suited to the needs that you're having right now. And actually our development team, that's what they want to know. They want to know if you're running into any issues using collaboration.

KENNETH FAUVER: Do we have an idea station for this?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I'm not sure if we have one set up with using BIM yet, but you can use the normal Plant 3D ideas station that we have-- to go there and submit your ideas. The other thing to note is that if you have any more questions, feel free to go to the answer bar. There will be a representative there answering Plant 3D questions and I believe he's on our-- our developer side as well. So he might be able to give some more insight on the collaboration process too. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Is anybody actually using this in the field yet? Do we know?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Oh, yeah. I do see some customers actually starting to use this.

KENNETH FAUVER: If not this particular, they're using variations of it like the Glue-- BIM 360 Glue and stuff like--

AUDIENCE: Plant application [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Right, yeah. I'm not-- I couldn't quote anybody that is using it. But we do have a few. Yeah.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I wanted to get to-- how much are we running on time? How much time we got left?

KENNETH FAUVER: It's 9:21.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: So we got 10 minutes.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah. Who all is familiar with the Autodesk knowledge network? That's-- that concerns me. Just next time you're online and you have a question about something type in in Google, Autodesk knowledge network. You can get through the IdeaStation through there, the forums. There's lots of white papers for Plant through there, BIM 360 as well. So I suggest that you all have some time while you're here to go visit that online.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: All right, does anybody have-- actually going to pull it up for you. Yeah, so the AKN is a good resource to go and look for information that you might be running into or problems or just general workarounds or even different workflows. Question?

AUDIENCE: My question is not related to the BIM part, but the development of [INAUDIBLE]. My company does a lot of the infrastructure as well as the [? Plants ?] themselves and we use Civil 3D for infrastructure [INAUDIBLE] and we can't marry them up. What are we doing to fix that?

KENNETH FAUVER: I guess the first thing is how do you want to marry them up? In what sense?

AUDIENCE: We want to be able to connect to the exterior infrastructure to the Plant model. They don't-- Civil 3D and Plant 3D never talk to each other.

KENNETH FAUVER: Right. Yeah, just an xref issue thing at the moment.

AUDIENCE: Right.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah. Yeah. The best way to handle that is through Navisworks. So you could put it all together with Navisworks and--

AUDIENCE: But it's also not a big [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: To at least clear [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah and that's-- that's what you have-- there needs to be some development in the object enabler and-- so you can have the data between the two marry up like, but--

AUDIENCE: Right. I guess my question is that on the table in the think tank to be able to solve because industry needs that solution.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah. Frankly, I can't answer that. I'm sorry.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: Exactly.

KENNETH FAUVER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Take your infrastructure model, nothing stopping you from importing [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: We're well aware of the integration issues that we're having. Unfortunately, I can't speak to where we're headed with that right now because I don't know.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

It was advanced still on Planet 3D and Civil 3D-- and Planet 3D-- and how that all integrates together. Right now everybody is having to use xrefing and use Navisworks to pull it all together-- Yes?

AUDIENCE: Project manger should [INAUDIBLE]. You should be able to project manager and launch with any of your apps, whether it's Advanced [? Steel ?] or [INAUDIBLE] infrastructure [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Right.

AUDIENCE: It should be [INAUDIBLE].

KENNETH FAUVER: Well, remember project manager is for Plant only. Right In are in order to have a really-- a truly, in my opinion-- to have a truly integrated solution, then you would have a dashboard that's not through any one of our apps. It's a standalone dashboard that launches whatever it needs launch. But I will not-- I-- personally I wouldn't support being able to do it through the project manager. So.

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Yeah, and another thing that you have to remember sometimes is that a lot of these products that you're using, whether it's Civil, whether it's Navis, Plant 3D-- it had its own origin in the beginning. So the code written for that particular program necessarily isn't going to be exactly the same for the others. So they're trying to make it more cohesive to where you could work streamlined through those, but it takes a little bit of coding that happens sometimes--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Right and they do, but it's not a simple fix sometimes. And if they try to fix it for Plant, then it might break one of the other ones. So it's a work in progress, but we're not going to get fast solutions right away sometimes-- with some issues, not all of them, but with some.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] software package [INAUDIBLE]?

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: Just for storage? Or--

AUDIENCE: Both. [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN CONTRERAS: I don't think it's been really tested and specialized just for some of the other products yet. This was the only one that I'm really familiar with with Plant right now. As we're pushing more of our cloud products right now, I could probably see more integration that way possibly. But I'm not sure. Probably the best thing you could do is, like I said, maybe go to the answer bar and ask for one of the Advanced Steel persons over there and they can probably get you some better answers, specifically for that.

All right so we're coming up here on the half hour again. Apologies for all the technical issues that we ran into. Unfortunately, that happens with labs sometimes. Hopefully, you got a good general of just using this for the first time and seeing what it actually does. Scott did put together some more information in the handout. So if you haven't got there yet, I didn't get a chance to go through everything, so you can try that.