Sharing ReCap Projects on Autodesk's Cloud Platforms

WINSTON PAGLIARO: OK, welcome to Sharing ReCap Projects on Autodesk's Cloud Platforms. My name is Winston Pagliaro. This is my first time speaking at Autodesk, so very excited to be doing that. I am currently the infrastructure enablement specialist at Autodesk. That is a fancy way of saying I help train and enable our support staff here at Autodesk for our infrastructure product portfolio.

So that's mainly Civil 3D, InfraWorks, ReCap, vehicle tracking, and the many extensions that Civil 3D seems to have. Before I took on this role, I was actually doing customer support here at Autodesk. So in my role doing that, I saw a lot of confusion, both internally and from customers, on this workflow. So that's what kind of sparked and led to this class being developed. And before that, I was a water resources engineer here in the Portland, Oregon area.

OK so that's me. I'm going to go ahead and start the show here. The Safe Harbor Statement, we've all seen that before. So I'll just kind of skip this.

And today's agenda. So these learning objectives are not different from what was on the AU website, but just a quick summary here. We're going to migrate data up to the cloud. We're going to discuss five different workflows, those are in the box there. And mainly, we're going to discuss the top two because they're, in my opinion, the most important.

And we're going to kind of prioritize them for that reason. But we are going to discuss the other three as well. Then we're going to talk about and demo sharing data out to a client or other designers, other Civil or architects, people that might use Civil 3D, Revit, Navisworks. And along the way, we are going to sprinkle in best practices, troubleshooting steps.

You'll find that, in the handout, those are kind of grouped together at the end of the handout. But for this presentation, I'm going to mention them as we go so that they're kind of naturally spread out through the workflow. I do want to mention here, just the scope of this. This is intended more for intermediate users of ReCap. So we're not going to cover introductory how to make a project and import scans and registration and all that stuff.

I also want to mention that I will be using ReCap 2023 today. And my Desktop Connector version is 15.7. But I will discuss ReCap 2022 as well. So if you're on that version, don't worry.

And everything tables, images, that kind of stuff that you see here, they are also in the handout. So don't feel like you need to take a picture or anything like that or memorize any procedure. All that stuff is in the handout in even greater detail I would say.

All right, so the first workflow is the publish feature. It is, in my opinion, the simplest, the most straightforward, and certainly, the one that the Desktop Connector team intended you to use. We are going to-- it's not a new feature to ReCap 2023. So I would not be surprised if most of you have tried it before. But we are going to demo it. So if you haven't, don't worry.

OK, so before we jump into a demo of the publish feature, I want to quickly discuss what files are moved up when you hit that Publish button inside ReCap. Because that is common misconception number one, is that all the files, the whole project is moved up. And that is not the case. So what is moved up is dependent on your version of ReCap and which cloud platform you're using, whether it's Docs or Autodesk Drive.

So there are two potential structures here, and we're going to look at them here. So Structure 1, on the left, you may also hear me refer to that as the Scan structure because the RCS files, the scan files themselves, which are typically quite large, are moved up. And then Structure 2, on the right, you may hear me refer to that as the RealView structure because the RCH, the RealView files, which are considerably smaller than the scan files, those are moved up and the scan files, that you'll notice, are not moved up.

Now I mentioned the size of the files there, that's going to become more important when we compare workflows later. Another thing to mention is that when you hit the Publish button, you don't get a choice as to what subset of files are moved up. That is automatically decided, again, based on your ReCap version and which cloud platform you're using. And the fact that you don't get a choice will become more important later.

And just here, a little context and history here. So in ReCap 2022, you've got Structure 2, regardless of which platform you chose. Then what happened was a lot of customers requested that the point cloud actually be viewable online in the viewer. And so the ReCap development team worked some magic and they made that happen. And so now we see from ReCap 2023, if you publish to Docs, we now get Structure 1, which remember, is the Scan structure with those RCS files.

OK, so now it's time. We are going to do a couple of things here. We're going to actually take a look at some files that were published in advance to Docs and drive. We're going to compare structure one and Structure 2 from a real project. I'm going to show you what a point cloud in the viewer actually looks like, in case you haven't seen it. And then we're going to do a publish together, with a small project.

So I am going to back out of the slide show here. And bring this up and I think what I might do, actually, is let me do this. That way we can side-by-side compare a little easier. OK.

And just to make sure we're comparing apples to apples here, we're going to compare the same project, but published to different locations. So on the left here, I have an ACC Docs project. And you can see here, this is the name of the project that I published. And the same project is over here on the right in Autodesk Drive.

So I'm going to open this one up and we'll open this up here on the right. OK, so the first thing to notice is that at the higher parent folder level, things are actually pretty similar, right? We see the RCP. We see image files and the support folder. Now where the difference comes in is if we dig a little deeper here.

So remember, I was using ReCap 23 and publishing to Docs. So we have Structure 1 on the left. So we see the RCC and RCS files. The RCC files are associated with structured scans. So you can expect an RCC file for each structured scan you have. So if you do this and don't see any RCC files, don't worry. It might be because you just don't have-- you might have an unstructured project.

And then on the right here in Drive, we've got no RCS or RCC files, but we do, in the temporary cache files folder, have these RCH, the RealView files. So let's also take a look at-- let me see here. I can make this a little bit bigger. We don't-- there we go.

OK, so obviously, this is going to vary-- the file size is going to vary from project to project. But I just want to give you a sense of the relative difference between the two because these RCSs are-- this one's 400, 400, 429, 600. 400, 500, 600 megs. They can be quite large. And then on the right here, we've got 40, 30, 30 megs. So almost an order of magnitude difference in terms of the size of the files that we're moving up to Docs. And that's going to be important because it's going to affect the length of time that it takes to upload these files.

So enough talk there. Let's actually now launch up ReCap. And I will just drag this back over here, so we have it.

OK, so I've got a project that is just living on my desktop. So let's-- and I'll just show it to you here before we-- called King Street. So RCP support folder, normal ReCap file structure here in the support folder. We've got RCCs. We've got the scans themselves. There are no attachments in this project, but if there were, they'd be in there. And then in here, we've got a lot more file types, right? Let's open that one up and that's-- go ahead and click that, and then--

OK, so let's demo a publish. The Publish button is up here. It looks like this little cloud icon. And I will click that. Oh, OK, all right. Wants me to save. So I want to point this out here because the first time you publish, it'll say new, not update. I have actually published this before when I was doing some testing. So it's prompting me to update because it thinks I'm publishing to the same place.

You'll likely see new, so for this demo, I'm going to switch this to new and pick a folder. We're going to publish to Docs for this demo here. So I'm going to-- I've set up a folder that's just empty right now and I'm going to right click in File Explorer and create a new folder. You can also create the folder in Docs online in advance. But you can do it here in File Explorer as well.

We'll just call this Published from 2023, something like that. And then I will select that folder and I don't want the copy of [INAUDIBLE], I don't want that.

So now notice here, you don't have to publish all the scans, but I'm going to opt to. So now I'm going to click Publish here. And I want to point out up in the top right, you'll notice it says publishing up here. And there are also Desktop Connector actions happening. So if you're not familiar with the Desktop Connector, if you right click on the Desktop Connector icon down in the windows tray, you can open up the pending actions here.

I would definitely recommend that you do that after a publishing. You can kind of monitor the status of things because you can see their actions processing. Now be careful with this published successfully, because it's a little misleading. It doesn't actually mean your publish is done. What it means is that ReCap is done handing the files off to Desktop Connection. Because we saw that even though it said published successfully, the connector was still publishing here.

So another reason I recommend having the pending actions open is that if some of these actions do fail, one, you can select the action and usually there's more information down here where under where it says Message. And two, if you right click over here, you can reapply those actions. And sometimes, that's all you have to do is try it again and sometimes it goes through.

OK, you can see now that those actions finished. They have gone through the connector. So let's actually check online here and see if those files made it up to Docs online. So this is run for, here's Publish 2023. There's my RCP. There's my image. And there is my scan and RCC files. So I only have two scans in this project so everything looks like it's up here to me. But I would definitely say once stuff is finished going through the connector, do a sanity check up here in Docs or drive, whichever platform you publish to, and make sure everything is there.

So we've got the data up here, what does that actually look like? So I'm going to open up this RCP file. And this is going to load in Autodesk Forge here, in the viewer. The amount of time that takes, I have noticed with larger projects, it seems to take a little longer. OK, so I'm zooming in here. Here's the project.

When we say that the point cloud is now viewable when you publish from 2023, this is what we mean. You can see the individual points. This icon down here, you can control the size of those points. And then all of this stuff is actually the same as before. So ReCap 2022 has the same buttons down here.

Now, if I want to switch to my RealViews, I can click that button here. And maybe let's do that as an example.

OK, and that's processing here. If I had any annotations, those would be here. And same thing with the view states and I've got the two scans there. So that is the publish feature. This is still loading, I'm not sure we're going to-- oh, no, there it goes. OK, so you can just pan around.

Now this is the same as if you were still using 2022. So really, the new feature with 2023 is that point cloud viewer. OK. So that is the publish feature demo. Let's hop back into the slideshow now.

OK, I want to take some time to discuss what can go wrong because that publish went pretty smoothly. But things do go wrong. So I think the most common root cause that causes some failed actions has to do with C drive space, insufficient C drive space. So one thing to understand here is that the Desktop Connector can temporarily require two to three times as much space as the file size that it's moving up.

So I hear sometimes, I've got 10 megs of space left, the project's only 9 megs, how come I'm having problems? So if the project's 9 megs, you might actually need 27 megs. So that's kind of issue number one.

Now, if you don't have a lot of space, if you've got a small computer, Desktop Connector has a new-ish feature-- I think it's been out for a few versions now-- where you can change your workspace to a different drive other than the C drive. So if you've got an external drive or something like that, you can change the place where it Desktop Connector caches files. And you can free up a lot of space like that. So keep that in mind. Make sure you have enough C drive space, a lot more than you need-- than you think you need, before you publish.

The other thing to mention is file path length. That's a Windows limitation. So that's, I think, 256. So you may need to shorten folders or publish to a folder that's higher up in that hierarchy to have a shorter path. And then interference with the Desktop Connector, commonly, that is antivirus. So if you've got an IT department that really tightly locks things down, definitely test this out before you kind of roll this out to your company because you want to make sure that antivirus isn't interfering with things going on.

Now this table on the right here has to do with the time needed to-- the time it took to publish. So this was for a larger project, 12 scans, 7 and 1/2 gigs, which for ReCap standards is not even that big. But it was bigger than what we're using today. And so I thought I would throw it up here. So published to Docs from 2023. That's exactly what we just did, except with a different project. Two hours. If you publish to Drive-- so that's a different structure, you're just looking at the smaller RealView files-- 10 minutes. So that's really a huge difference.

And then if you manually uploaded it to Docs, Structure 1, 1 and 1/2 hours. Now we haven't covered the manual method and how to do that, but just kind of keep that in the back of your mind now, because that's where we're headed. Because as you can see, you get a little bit of an efficiency boost if you are willing to manually upload. And then to Save As, again, that's Workflow 3 that we're going to discuss later. Just keep that in mind that it takes even longer, the longest out of all three. OK.

There we go, all right. So before we wrap up on the publish, I just want to take a second here to explain this little graphic I made here because it's important, conceptually, to understand the manual method that we're about to get into. So as a summary here, ReCap compiles a subset of files, depending on the version and the platform, hands them off to the connector, and then the connector turns around and hands those off to the cloud.

So if we understand what subset of files we need, then we can kind of step in and replace the Desktop Connector and do the manual workflow. OK, so that's a good segue, I think, to Workflow 2. So the basic gist of Workflow 2 is the first decision that you need to make is which subset of files do I need? Structure 1 or Structure 2?

And that basically comes down to do I really want that point cloud viewable in the viewer? And if it's not that important to me, go with Structure 2. If it is important, go with Structure 1. And also keep in mind that if you go with Structure 2, it's going to be faster.

Then you're going to recreate the folder structure on your chosen platform. You're going to cache RealViews, if needed. So remember, the RealViews are the .rch files. So that's only applicable if you've chosen Structure 2. And then you're going to upload the files to the folders you created.

I do want to mention that there is a cheat sheet near the end of the handout that kind of helps you step through the decisions you might make, depending on how you want to use the data once it's up in the cloud. So definitely use that cheat sheet, if you can. OK. All right, so we are going to demo the manual method. Before we do, I am actually going to hop back here.

So recall that if you're using the published feature in ReCap 2023 and you're publishing to Docs, you get Structure 1, right? You don't get a choice. What we're going to do now, with the manual method, is we're actually going to upload Structure 2 to Docs. So we're going to do something that you can't do. If you just use the publish feature.

So what I hope to prove to you is that not only is the manual method a little faster, but it also gives you more flexibility, depending on if you want a different structure than what the published feature automatically chooses for you. OK. All right, so let's do this.

We've got run for here. The first thing I'll do is add a subfolder here. And I'll just call it Manuel Structure 2 from 2023, something like that. OK.

All righty, so the first thing we need is the RCP. And this is not order dependent. I shouldn't have said it's the first thing we need, but it's usually what I start with just because it's right out here. OK, so I'm just going to drag that over and that's going to upload.

OK. Now what I'm going to do is create the support folder. So it's King Street Support. And make sure you get spelling and all that good stuff right.

Now you may remember that there was actually an image file out here too. So where is that image file? It is inside the temporary cache files folder of your project. So what I would recommend you do is when you get in here, sort by file type, just to make it a little easier to navigate. And now notice that this project actually has four image files. So I can tell you that the ones with map in the name, you don't need. So you can ignore those.

Now it's kind of difficult to tell which of these two you need because of these GUIDs are pretty cryptic. But they're pretty small. They're just images. So instead of worrying about it, I just upload any PNG that I find in here that does not have map in the suffix. OK. So that is that.

Now we are going to get into the support folder itself. And since we're doing Structure 2, we also need to create this temporary cache files folder. So I'm going to do that right here. Temporary Cache Files. There it is. I should also mention that if you have attachments in your project, you should also make the attachments folder at this time.

I don't, so I'm not going to do that. But I'm going to hop in here. And what is needed for Structure 2 in the temporary cache files folder are the RCH files. Excuse me. So I'm going to go find those. And here they are. I'm just going to highlight them here so you see them.

Now I want to point out that if you don't see your RCH files, don't be concerned. All that means is that you haven't cached them yet. So let's talk about caching them, because if you are using 2023, you can come here in your Scan Locations and if I select one and then if you have a bunch you can hold Shift and then select another one and you will select multiple at a time. And then you right click and you say cache RealView. That will generate those RCH files in the temporary cache files folder.

Now that is only for 2023. That's a new feature. So if you are in 2022, you have two options. You can start a publish and you don't even have to finish the publish. Starting the publish will prompt ReCap to generate the RCH files. Or you can manually open each scan RealView in the project at a time.

And so that's why mine were already cached because I was working in the project and was navigating around. So if you're working in the project a lot, odds are good they're already cached. But if they aren't, that's how you do that. Now if you're using 2022, I will say that it's smoother using the cache RealView function in 2023, let's put it that way.

OK, so now I'm going to drag these RCH files, similar to the way we ignored the images that had a suffix before, you're going to ignore the preview.rch files. So just these two. And that lines up with what I have in my project, because I only have two scans in this project. So I'm only expecting two RCHs. And we can see that those are uploading.

All right, so that is it for Structure 2. And like I mentioned before, you should probably check-- do a sanity check. Let's open this up here and make sure it actually opens. OK, cool.

Now this is not Structure 1, remember, so we're not expecting to see the point cloud viewable. I'm only expecting the RealViews in here. And that is what I see. I see two RealViews and let's just give us a second here, make sure that opens up. And there we go. That looks-- there's my spheres, OK.

So that all passes my smell test. So that is the manual method for Structure 2. But the manual method can be applied to for Structure 1 as well. So as long as you understand which files you need, you can use that.

All right, I'm going to hop back in the PowerPoint here. All right, so I mentioned this earlier on, but Workflow 3, 4, and 5, I'm going to skip some steps just for time's sake. And also for the fact that a lot of the features mentioned in these three are not new to 2023. They've been around. So OK. So this one, you could Save As and browse to a location on Docs or Drive, essentially then saving the entire project up in the cloud.

Now I think we can all kind of imagine why that's appealing, right? If the whole project is up in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. You could have other coworkers access it and make edits to the project. So that's really appealing. I can't recommend it currently for a few reasons. One, in my testing, after you Save As, that sends files to the Desktop Connector and just a bunch of failures and a lot of babysitting to work through those. So not super smooth there.

ReCap development does not support this workflow, technically. So that's their official stance currently. And then, even if you get it up there, I've noticed that editing a project up in the cloud is not super smooth. If you choose to do it anyway, check the handout. I have some suggestions for things to try, if you're going to do that. But I can't officially recommend it here and be confident in that recommendation.

OK, so that is Workflow 3. Workflow 4 is the unified file. This is my recommendation for if you are sharing data with other designers, people who are going to take the data and continue a design, whether it be Revit, Civil 3D User, AutoCAD, whatever.

Now you might be thinking, we already published or manually uploaded files up there. So why do we need to-- why do we need another step of exporting a unified file? There's a couple of reasons. It cuts down on the number of files that the designer, whomever you're sharing it with, will need to sync back on their end. Because remember, you're uploading to the cloud, they then have to sync down locally on their end.

So reduces the number, but also reduces the file size. Because when you export, you get the option to decimate. And for some of these larger projects, I think you probably should decimate. I think the designer on the receiving end would happily appreciate that.

And then I, myself, during some testing, had some inconsistent results in Civil 3D when I was trying to insert Structure 1 projects that I'd uploaded to the cloud. Now that being said, Revit seems to bring those in A-OK, so you can try it. But my official recommendation is to go this way for those three reasons.

Now if you've exported before, you might already be aware that you're going to lose texture. So that is one downside to this message. Now I've already prepared a unified RCP file. So we're not going to do that together. But a unified file is pretty old ReCap functionality, so my hope is that you guys have used it before.

OK, Workflow 5 is a mesh, generating a mesh. Because the Revit or Navisworks designer might come to you and say point cloud's great, but I really love a mesh. The standard mesh feature was released in ReCap 2022-- or I should say brought back in 2022. So it's not new to 2023.

And most of you guys have probably tried it before, but if you haven't, I want to mention a couple of things. It costs Flex Tokens, formally called Cloud Credits. So there's an additional cost associated. There's also on the account and an additional entitlement needed. It's called scan to mesh, but it's commonly missed because it's not clear that it's related to ReCap, when you're looking at all the entitlements, so don't forget about that.

When you use scan to mesh, the output will only have texture if your project was structured. So if it's unstructured, it'll be a gray, colorless mesh. And then as of early August, a new feature that is really cool is an NWC file now is also included in the scan to mesh output. It makes it really easier now to get that stuff into Revit and Navis and the texture is baked in as well, assuming it's a structured project, of course.

So the scan to mesh data processing does take a little bit of time. And since it's not new, we're not going to do that together. But I have done one in advance. So I'm hoping we get to at least show you what you get. I want to show the NWC, if we have time.

OK, so before we demo sharing with a client or another designer, prerequisites. Whomever you're sharing with will need an Autodesk account, which is free. But they do have to go in there and make it. They'll need permissions to the folders, whether it's Drive or Docs.

If you are using Docs, they have to accept that project invitation that they get in their email. It is supposedly-- the invitation supposedly includes a subscription to Docs. So if they don't already have a subscription to Docs, that's great. We will discuss a slight little issue with that that I ran into earlier.

If you're going to Drive, they need an active entitlement to Autodesk Drive, which is free, but only with the purchase of at least one Autodesk product. So if they're a designer, and they are using Revit or Civil, odds are good that they can easily get an active entitlement to Autodesk Drive, if they don't already have it. But if they're a client or somebody kind of more removed from the design process, they might not have a product assigned to their account.

So that, in my opinion, is an advantage of Doc's over Drive. But Drive is free, whereas Docs is not. OK, let's actually get into a demo here on sharing. We're also going to leave some feedback or notes in the online viewer and then pull that back down into the ReCap project on ReCap desktop, locally.

So let's do that here. Bring this back up. OK. So I should mention that for this demo, I have created a dummy Gmail account that is associated with an Autodesk account, but does not have any products assigned to it.

And I've added it-- I've added that account to both the project here in Docs, as well as Autodesk Drive. But we're going to take a look at permissions together. Now I alluded to this before about a slight hiccup on the Docs invitation. So I'm going to show you exactly what I mean here. So let's go to Project Admin here. And you can see there's two Winstons. This one, the Gmail, is the dummy account.

So notice here in the Project Admin it says Docs is assigned, right? You're like, oh, great. All good, right? Trial expired. I noticed that when I signed in earlier. My dummy account, when I signed in, told me that my trial expired. So it's a little confusing there as to whether or not a Docs license is actually included, at least in my mind.

But I'm going to show you how to get around that. So I'm going to go to Account Admin. We're going to go to members. And here is that dummy account right here. So notice here, it's telling me, hey, Winston's trial is expired. The dummy account doesn't have their own Doc's subscription.

So you can grant them, here, you can grant them one of your seats. And that's exactly what I'm going to do right now. And that's saved up here, which is great. Before we log in as that dummy account, I also want to show you permissions, because that's another important thing.

Let's go to Docs here. OK. Where-- permission settings, there we go. All right, so the dummy account currently has edit permissions. If you want them to be able to leave comments, they need edit permissions or higher. Same thing for a designer who's going to sync the files down and do things like in Revit or Civil. Give them edit or higher.

If you only want them to be able to view things in the viewer, but not leave comments, you can go one level down here. But I've currently got it set up here with edit permissions. Very similar in Drive, the permissions settings are slightly different, but let's hop back out here. Here's this folder, share. So you can see there's really only two options here in Autodesk Drive, download and edit.

So I've got the dummy account set to edit. One other thing to mention is that you don't want to share the RCP individually. So go at least one folder back up and share that. So this one here, I'm actually going a couple folders up. But don't share the individual RCP file. You need more than that when you're sharing.

OK, so now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to sign out of my Autodesk Admin Account. OK. And I'm going to sign in with the dummy account. And we're just going to pretend that I'm a client or somebody else. OK. That's funny.

All right, here we go. Register for AU. OK. Where are we here? Files, ACC project.

Wonder if I-- forgot-- here, let me sign back out.

OK, so now I am logged in as the dummy account, the Gmail account. Now if you remember, I gave myself permission to the whole AU folder. So I can see everything here as the Gmail account. So I'm actually going to, let's see, we did run for today. That's what we published earlier. So I'm going to open up what we did here and I'm going to pretend to leave a comment as if I'm a project owner or something like that.

So maybe we'll hop into the first scan here. Let's see, maybe I'll go to the second scan. There we go. Switch to the RealView, OK.

So let's maybe leave a note. And I don't know, we'll say replace-- oh, looks like I did this before. Replace whiteboard. OK, we'll save that.

So that's a note, but you can also do measurements, markups, so various different types of annotations. Now if you're online here in the viewer, you can see all the annotations here from yourself and also anybody else who's left annotations here. But you might want to see these back down in the ReCap project locally. So let's now show how to do that.

So I'm going to bring ReCap here. And we are still in the local project that's just on my desktop. What I'm going to do is just under the Publish button there's another button here, looks kind of like a chain link icon. It says Connect Project. And by default, the path here is to whichever you last published to, which in my case, is exactly what we want.

Run 4, that's what we did today. So all you need to do is hit this Browse button and-- oh, there it goes. Run 4. I'm going to select the RCP, and now you'll notice the OK button, which was previously grayed out, is now available to be clicked. So I will click that. So what did that do? That connected this local project that lives on my desktop to the published project that's up in Docs, so that hopefully, whenever annotations are made online, they then sync back down here.

Now what I've noticed here is you can see that there are no annotations here in this project yet. What I've noticed is-- sure, I'll save it. What I've noticed is that it's not automatic. So-- yes, close that. And I'm going to reopen a ReCap, and we'll reopen King Street from my desktop.

OK. So we will reopen. You see this message here that said-- it was just a brief second there, but that's actually the Desktop Connector checking for new comments, annotations, notes. And then if it finds them, it brings them down here locally. So now you can see replace whiteboard, and you see it here as well.

So that is the Connect project feature. That's how to use that. Just keep in mind that it's not automatic. So if you've got a project open currently, and somebody makes a comment while you have the project open locally, you may have to close the project and reopen to see them.

OK, so that is integrating feedback. What I want to do now is actually open up Civil and show you inserting a unified RCP file. And we'll point out something as well there.

Let's actually browse to that while we wait for Civil to open. You know, browse to it in Windows File Explorer here. And here's my project. [INAUDIBLE] files, AU. And I mentioned earlier, I actually did this earlier. So here's unified.

So now put yourself in the shoes of a designer whom you've shared this file with. So they're obviously going to have their own computer, their own Desktop Connector version. This status icon means that the file is synched. Let's maybe look. We'll compare it with a different status icon. No, those are all synched too.

OK, so this cloud icon here, in comparison, means that the connector knows the file is there, but it's not synched and we don't have it locally cached. So one thing to mention to the designer, whomever you're sharing this with, I recommend that the files that they're going to use when they insert or link in Revit, that they sync those files down first.

So what I'm going to do in Civil here is just open up a blank template. And I'm not going to worry about collaboration-- or excuse me, not collaboration. Geolocation and coordinate systems, right? Because that's kind of a whole other can of worms. But on the Insert tab in Civil here, I go to Attach Point Cloud. And let's back up a folder here. Here's the RCP, I'm going to select that.

That opened up off to the side, I'll drag it over. So again, I'm not concerned with this being located correctly in a coordinate system. I just want to show that it comes in. And that you-- I will say, if this isn't synched, the RCP, RCS, whatever you're bringing in, you may get an error message down here in the command line saying that it can't find the file. So be aware of that.

Now I was in the scan to mesh file before. So maybe that's a good reminder that-- just I wanted to show that you now as of it's a new feature in early August, you get this NWC file with the output, along with the traditional stuff you got, like the ReCap photo model here and the OBJ and the texture files that are zipped up in there.

OK, so the last thing I want to mention is a colleague of mine pointed out to me that in Revit, there seems to be an extra step. And I will fully admit to not being a Revit expert, because stuff came in-- the point clouds and the mesh were coming into Revit fine for me. But I have been told from those more experienced in the architecture sphere that sometimes the person that makes the point cloud and uploads it has no problem linking into Revit, but everybody else may have a problem if they don't do this extra step.

And that is you go to File Locations and you change the root path here in Revit. So just be aware of that extra step. This article is mentioned in the handout for your reference as well. But I wanted to mention that because you may run into that in Revit. OK, so that is sharing with a client kind of person, but also a designer.

So back in here. We are at the final takeaways here. And I've got them here. I'll just kind of run through them. There's a cheat sheet in the handout. I would highly recommend you use it. I spent a lot of time on it and I think it's pretty good to help you guide through all the various decisions and my recommended workflow for whatever you're trying to do.

I also have tables and some parts in the handout where I compare things. So I compare if you're going to Drive versus if you're going to Docs, if you're on the fence about which platform to use. If you're using 2022 versus 2023, and you're not sure is it worth it to update. I compare the two versions. And I compare the Publish feature to the other two features, the Save As and the Manual Workflow as well.

So I definitely find those in the handout. They're near the end. C drive space is a common issue. So make sure you have enough of that. And if you don't and you're commonly battling it, consider changing your workspace. My recommendation, especially for large projects that are huge. I mean, some-- I've heard, anecdotally, from customers of published times in the days. So 20%, 25% efficiency boost when we're talking about days can be a lot. So consider the manual upload for large projects.

If you can live without the point cloud and the viewer, it's way faster. So just kind of consider that. But it is a very nice feature, so I would understand if you want it.

If you're sharing with designers, the unified file is my recommendation. And then if you're looking for a small project to test this out, the sample project that comes with ReCap, which is found in the program data Autodesk Autodesk ReCap folder, that is a nice small-- It's only two scans, and they're structured scans. That's a good one to use, in my opinion.

And just one last reminder. I know I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I don't recommend putting the whole project up in the cloud. And we've gone over the reasons why. So with that, I would like to thank you for watching this presentation. It was a pleasure to put it together. And now I hope that you have a better understanding of which workflow you should use, depending on what you're trying to do with your ReCap data.

Thank you.