Navisworks: It‘s Not Just for Contractors

JIM: Both of these folks are BIM specialists and RATIO architects. And they actually both have been there for two years. And they come from a reseller background.

Tom [INAUDIBLE] was a BIM implementation specialist at Advanced Solutions. So, he's seen everything. He's heard every complaint, every way you can do things. He's a seasoned pro. He's trained hundreds of people.

He's married with two children. 20-year-old son is going to be a high school teacher. His 16-year-old daughter plays a baritone, which I just found out is an instrument. I thought it was a range of tones.

Then I asked him, I said, is music in your family, Tom? And his reply was, that's how I met my wife. I was the sexy sax player.

[CROWD LAUGHS]

THOMAS J. KEMP: That's the part he made up.

JIM: So I said these guys are yin and yang. Tom is our season pro, steady Eddie, loves giving back, hates speaking.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Yes.

JIM: OK, so, whenever I do a presentation, I don't get comfortable until I see some head nods or some clapping. So can we give Tom a round of applause.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Yeah, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JIM: As I said, that's Tom. He's our yin. Sarah's our yang. She's not as old as Tom-- or seasoned as Tom, sorry, HR department. She's also been at RATIO for two years.

THOMAS J KEMP: Am I on? He doesn't have a [INAUDIBLE].

JIM: Mark says she was a hired gun at Microdesk. Here.

SARAH CAUSEY: He's just doing our intro.

THOMAS J. KEMP: He's just doing an intro.

SARAH CAUSEY: Sorry to freak you out.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Oh no. He's just doing an intro.

JIM: She was a hired vet at Microdesk. So again, she's seen it all. But her knowledge comes from the big projects, projects we have 40 people involved.

And I asked her, I said, how did you get involved with Navisworks? And she said, well, my husband, my love connection at Microdesk, worked at Microdesk and was using apps around AECOM and showed her all the things you could do. And it was love at first sight at Navisworks when she saw innovations in using [INAUDIBLE] and whatnot.

Actually [INAUDIBLE], she has a rescue dog named Roscoe? And I said, is it R-O-S-C-O-E, right? Got a head not. You and Mary are in the same boat. No, it's not as hip as [? BE. ?] Sorry.

MARY: [LAUGHS QUIETLY]

JIM: Then I said-- the last question, obviously, is OK, you've been married two-and-one-half years. And I said, you got any kids? And the response was, not yet. Take it away.

SARAH CAUSEY: Thanks Jim.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Thanks Jim. And thanks everyone. This is the last class on the last day. So thank you everyone for showing up. And it's great.

[APPLAUSE]

We expected about six people here. So hopefully, this is the cherry on the top of your AU experience. This is Navisworks. It's not just for contractors. Hopefully, you've seen these.

We're going to be talking about Navisworks in the design phase, so using Navisworks for design coordination, outlining what the difference is between design coordination and construction coordination, what those differences are when we're talking about Navisworks. And we're going to look at how to configure Navisworks for design coordination and some tips on how to take that back and implement that at your firm. If that doesn't sound like that's what you're after, there's actually another Navisworks class right across the hall. So, we want you to stay. But if this sounds a little too basic for you, there is another class right across the hall.

Couple of housekeeping things. Silence your cell phone if you haven't already. We do feel like we have a lot of content to get through. But we're planning at least five or 10 minutes at the end. And since we are the last class, we'll stick around as long as anyone wants us to stick around.

All the screenshots and everything are from Navis 2017. That's what all our projects are on right now. So if you're working in 2018, it might look a little different.

And everyone likes to take pictures of the slides-- totally fine. It's already on the app. And we'll email it out. So you don't have to take pictures if you don't want to. We don't need to cover this. Jim covered that for us.

SARAH CAUSEY: So a little bit about who RATIO is. We work for a firm that was founded in 1982. You can see on the screen, we're multidisciplinary. We started as a historic preservation firm and really branched out from there.

Tom and I are in the Indianapolis office. We've got some other team members here that are in Raleigh, and Chicago, and Champaign. And this is a good infographic of where some of our projects are located. That's a little snapshot of who RATIO is.

And we want to know who you are. So how many owners do I have? How many owners or management-level people? Cool. Any architects? Yeah.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Yeah, architects!

SARAH CAUSEY: Any interior designers? All right! You are a liar! We've got a liar in the room. Who else? Any contractors? Uh oh.

AUDIENCE: No.

SARAH CAUSEY: Oh, OK. Any BIM managers? BIM people? All right, you're our competition. No, no, you're our friends. You're our friends. OK, good, that helps gauge what we're talking about today.

THOMAS J. KEMP: So to start out with, we want to put this in context of where we're coming from and why we've gone through this implementation. So I want everyone to think of that perfect BIM project that they've done. I'm sure everyone's done a perfect BIM project, right?

You've got what we call a BIM deployment plan. We don't like to execute our BIM teams, so we deploy BIM. We don't execute it.

You've got a deployment plan. You're trading models with your consultants. You're having meetings with the Revit model open going through coordination and everything. You think everything's coordinated and great, right?

You get to construction, and you hand that model off to the contractor. And at that first construction coordination meeting, they pop up a Navisworks model. And it shows 53,724 conflicts in the model. We coordinated this already. Where is all this stuff coming from?

SARAH CAUSEY: So imagine instead, if you walk into that meeting, and it's-- for those of you on design teams, instead of walking in with black and white, printed out documents, you're looking at something like this. So the whole concept of today is visualizing our models like this in the design phase, earlier on. So you're able to work in that room, finding clashes, finding problems, and talking to them as a design team to resolve them, catching them quicker, not just leaving it for the CA phase.

THOMAS J. KEMP: So, what we're presenting is a process that works, it's worked for us, that's built on software that you probably already own to add value to your design services. The intent is to leverage the BIM that you already have to coordinate more efficiently and increase the effectiveness of design. If we're better coordinated, we can spend more time fine tuning that design.

Now, we haven't generated any numbers where we can quantify that this process has reduced errors, and omissions, or anything of that nature. It's just, we haven't done two projects and done one with this process and one without. So we don't have any of that kind of data that we can share with you.

SARAH CAUSEY: Two of the same project.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Two of the same project. We have not done the identical project with and without. So we can't compare.

SARAH CAUSEY: Does that make sense, what he's saying? People the last couple of days keeps throwing out, 90% savings. How are you quantifying that because you're never going to build the same building the same way two times, one way and one-- does that make sense? Are you with me?

THOMAS J. KEMP: What we can't quantify is that the project managers, project directors at RATIO are asking for this process to start earlier and earlier in their projects. So we've really pushed to just run this through the construction document phase. But we have project managers asking for it early in design development to get started.

So if you're not using Navisworks regularly, hopefully this inspires you to make that leap and jump in. It can be a bit intimidating. If you're already a Navisworks user, for those of you that are contractors maybe, hopefully we've got just a couple tips to help you be a little more efficient and understand what we're doing on the design side.

So, a few words about Navisworks before we jump in a little more deeper, Navisworks can be a really complicated application. It does a lot of things. We're really just focused on the clash detective part of the application and some functionality that relates to that.

Something that's important to understand that was confusing to me when I first started working with Navisworks is some of the file formats we're going to work with, so .NWF, .NWC, .NWD files. And this is not necessarily what this stands for, but this is how I remember it. .NWF file is the Navisworks federated file. So that's the file where we're going to take all our models from different consultants and combine them all together. So I remember F for Federated, .NWF.

Then the .NWC file is the individual files from consultants. So C for consultant, .NWC, that's the file we get from our structural, from our MEP. Then .NWD file is a file that we're going to distribute back to the team. So .NWD, D for distribution, makes it easy to remember.

So, we want to differentiate between design coordination and construction coordination. And really what we're talking about is the difference between clash prevention and clash detection. And these are things that in your BIM deployment plan for your project that can and should be defined, what they are, what you're going to do, how you're going to use that model.

They look a lot alike, clash prevention, clash detection. It's going to be a lot of the same people involved in the process, a lot of the same tools. But they're really two distinctly different things.

So clash prevention, it's a different design phase BIM use, something that should be implemented by the design team. We're talking about using LOD 300 models. So we're just looking at geometry that represents the design intent.

Whereas clash detection is construction phase activity, construction phase BIM use. That's something that the construction team would be implementing. They're looking at higher level of detail models, actual fabricated geometry models that represent actual fabricated geometry.

So the goals here, the last two lines on both columns, the goals of clash prevention are really to increase communication and coordination and increase the effectiveness of the design. Whereas the clash detection process is really focused on avoiding conflicts in the field and managing the schedule and the budget. They look a lot alike, but two distinct things.

And that was a big thing for us as we move into the case study to get our project directors, project managers to understand that difference. We got a lot of push back on why are we doing this? This is a contractor's job. Once we got them to understand that difference, we're moving forward.

So we're going to look at our implementation a little bit as a case study. A couple of the goals we laid out for ourselves when we got started, we're looking to improve the coordination between disciplines in the construction document phase. And not looking to add to that coordination process, we're looking to increase the efficiency, to really let that coordination that we should be doing anyways make that a more efficient process.

And then a third goal that was imposed on us is to utilize tools that were already in our tool kit as part of our subscription. So, we know there's tools out there that do clash detection, clashed prevention. But we already had a couple of licenses in Navisworks. That's where we're doing all the heavy lifting. And then Revit, that's our main offering tool. And we've thrown it a little bit of Dynamo as well.

So, this clash prevention process, again, it runs through the construction document phase. And this is something that should follow your normal coordination cycle with your consultants. So if you've got a design coordination meeting with your structural MEP once a week, every two weeks, whatever that cycle is, we're running on that same cycle and piggybacking on top of that process. So we're going to come walk through what this process is so you can understand all the steps involved.

The first step is to get .NWC models from our consultants. So it's important that they generate those. We don't want to take liability for that. We want them to deliver that .NWC model to us to coordinate with. That's something that we outline in our deployment plan.

SARAH CAUSEY: Then in our case at RATIO, the BIM specialists are typically Tom, or I, or Heather, our third wheel. No, we love her. She's an equal part. We export the .NWC file for the architectural content, so just like the consultants did.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Then one of the BIM specialists takes all of those .NWC files and compiles that federated Navisworks file, that .NWF file.

SARAH CAUSEY: Then the BIM specialists and the project director, or project architect, sit together and review some standard clash tests we're going to go over here in a little bit that we use.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Those clash tests feed into what we call the Action Tracker. So we review those standard clash tests, identify any specific project requirements, and generate a Excel spreadsheet that feeds into the agenda for that coordination meeting.

SARAH CAUSEY: Then we go back to that .NWD for distribution. The BIM specialist publishes that file and distributes it to all consultants.

THOMAS J. KEMP: One of the BIM specialists, whoever's working on the project, will attend that coordination meeting. That's a little bit of a key piece to this is that someone that knows how to run that model is in that coordination meeting so that the architect, the project engineer, they can focus on the issues and not worry about the technology.

SARAH CAUSEY: And then the Action Tracker Tom mentioned a minute ago guides the review of Navisworks. It helps guide and helps outline the agenda for the meeting.

THOMAS J. KEMP: And from there, it's just a-- no, sorry-- any action items are recorded in that spreadsheet. So next steps, things that need to be followed up on get recorded in that spreadsheet. And that gets distributed back out to the team after the meeting as a follow-up for the next meeting.

From there, it's just a rinse and repeat. Whatever that cycle is, we're going to work right at that same pace.

AUDIENCE: What's in [INAUDIBLE] you get from a consultant's .NWF, what's the big deal? It's the same thing you get from [INAUDIBLE].

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah, so just to give you a little insight-- that's a great question. We'll just answer this real quick, and then we'll keep going. Oh, what's that? Oh, repeat the question. Thank you.

THOMAS J. KEMP: So the question--

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah.

THOMAS J. KEMP: The question is, what's the difference between working with an .NWF or an .NWC file?

SARAH CAUSEY: Sure. So the way that we've agreed in our BIM deployment plans-- and this is just what we do it RATIO. So absolutely, if other teams have Navisworks Manage, and they want to distribute .NWF federated models, that's fine. A lot of our consultants for whatever reason typically don't have Navisworks Manage. I think that's going to change because now I don't know how many people have Collections now. Manage is in that package.

Until this point, a lot of our consultants didn't have it because we're on the design team. So the Navisworks Exporter Tool we're going to look at here is free. And it comes out of Revit. Yeah, and it pushes on .NWC.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah.

THOMAS J. KEMP: You can also work with Revit models in Navisworks. Our preference, again, is to work with those .NWC files. It's a little more efficient when you get into Navisworks. All right?

SARAH CAUSEY: Yep. So I'm going to go live if the Revit gods are on our side.

THOMAS J. KEMP: You need to go through this part first.

SARAH CAUSEY: I know. So that's why I'm moving around a lot. I hope I'm not distracting you. But I'm doing it to keep you all awake.

We're going to talk a little bit about Revit. And then we're going to go live. And we're going to cross our fingers.

In Revit, we set up in RATIO a couple of 3D views, their own view type. And we use the word Navisworks in the name. I'd like to say that we trust all of our BIM users, and they're great, but sometimes people just want to work in whatever view they want to work in.

So by incorporating the word Navisworks in the view, I think for the most part, our users know to stay out of that view. Don't use it as a working view. This is just for our export. I'm just going to go ahead and pull this plug. If you guys do fill out some surveys at the end of the class, we're happy to send you this view template that are going to go over right now because I think it'll keep a shortcut for you.

So there's a couple of things we make sure we have on and off in this view. As Tom mentioned earlier in our .NWCs, we really only want our own content. Just to emphasize why, we want to make sure that when we're exporting the architecture .NWC, it's the stuff that we're responsible for. And if the mechanical engineer is exporting his own .NWC, it's what he's responsible for. That way, nobody accidentally hid something, nobody's liable for things. We want to reduce that.

So no links are on in here, no CAD, no Revit links, just architectural content. No annotation or analytical categories are on. We turn off areas, lines, masses, parts, and Raster images.

And as you can see, we're in a detail level of fine and a visual style of shaded. We have a whole screenshot at how-to guide that goes out to our consultants. And we agree that we're all going to set up that view the same way so when we transmit our Revit models, we've got the same set up. And everything coming into Navisworks is consistent. Cool?

I do also want to mention that a lot of our consultants, our MEP consultants, will distribute one .NWC for all the M, the E, and the P. But it's also totally reasonable to separate that. So in that case, your MEP consultant might have three of these views-- one that just has electrical content on, one that has mechanical, and one has plumbing. And they'll export those 3D views individually. Does that makes sense?

Next slide, we're going to look at the export utility we were just talking about. So it's free. It's downloadable from [INAUDIBLE] website. And it just shows up in your Add-ins tab.

And again, we're looking at 2017 today. So 2018 might look a little different. But all of our projects in CA now are a couple of years old. So we're in '17.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah, you just go to the Add-ins tab in External Tools. And this window comes up. You can see we've got our architecture, our MEP structure. I'm going to talk about what Rooms is here in a second.

And when you click on that Navisworks setting button, this is the window that pops up. And there's a lot of options you can do in here. But I just want to emphasize a couple that are super important.

One is convert element IDs and convert element properties. So, we've got all this metadata in our Revit models, right? Why not push that to Navisworks? So all that's doing is converting the Revit stuff to Navisworks stuff. And the reason we want to do that, we'll get into later, so we can grab things that we need to sort and clash by.

And the other really important one is coordinates. So, there's a couple of options. We always choose Project Internal. As Tom talked about before in our BIM deployment plans, we've agreed upon an origin. I'm sure you're all doing this.

And all of our Revit models are linked in origin to origin. By choosing Product Internal and exporting the current view, it goes right in where it's supposed to go in Navisworks. Does that make sense?

THOMAS J. KEMP: And I want emphasize that you really want to have your origin worked out before you start pushing stuff to Navisworks. You don't to start moving models around in Navisworks and trying to get them to line up. So that's really a foundation for making a process work.

SARAH CAUSEY: A little teaser here, and again, if you fill out those class surveys, I don't mind sending this either. One thing that we've seen is incorporating this earlier on in the design phase, especially with teams that have never seen Navisworks before, one of the biggest challenges is orienting themselves. Orienting, orienteering, is that a thing? You can go up in the woods and orienteer?

So if you look at this screenshot on the right, sometimes it's difficult in the design team coordination meeting to understand what I'm looking at. What corridor is that? What shaft is this? I'm confused.

So what we've done is super simple. There's a 3D model text family. It's just a 3D family in Dynamo. And again, I'll share this with you.

It looks for all the rooms in our Revit model, places a 3D model text family in that same location, and copies over the room name and the room number. And we export that as it's own .NWC.

So that's the 3D view, Navisworks export 3D Room Names. It's just the names. It comes in on its own. We can toggle it on or off in Navisworks. And I think that helps our teams. They do have grids in Navisworks. But sometimes they're not enough.

You guys crossing your fingers for me that this is going to work? I'm going to make you stand up. Don't be mad at me. We're halfway, yeah, yeah, almost done?

THOMAS J. KEMP: Last class, last day.

SARAH CAUSEY: Woo-hoo! We're all awake. OK, good job. Yeah, stretch. Sit down if you've ever had a perfectly coordinated design model.

AUDIENCE: What?

SARAH CAUSEY: A perfectly coordinated design model. I know. I know. Can anybody give me a couple of reasons why even though we work really hard in Revit and we try our best, why we might miss something in Revit alone? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: When the disciplines have exported their models, they have not followed the criteria, so the [? ceilings ?] model may have doors, windows, floors, and other features.

SARAH CAUSEY: Ah, that's a good one, good job. Rena?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

SARAH CAUSEY: Rena, good job. Anybody else? Come on, we've done it, I know. Yeah, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: The client's occasionally might just use their own models.

SARAH CAUSEY: (LAUGHING) No. Yeah, that's good. There's a million design options in there, and you're just-- Kelly did you have one? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: There's few options, but lack of time.

SARAH CAUSEY: Lack of time. That's good. Yeah, that's so true. Anybody else?

THOMAS J. KEMP: What about when someone hides their model in detail views and just drafts everything?

[LAUGHTER]

Nobody ever does that?

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: The difference in live model detailing and 2D detailing.

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah. Mary said live model detailing versus 2D detailing. OK, you can sit down. Good job.

THOMAS J. KEMP: I thought you were going to make them all stand up for the rest of the class.

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah. I got to stand up, you got to stand up, too. No, I'm kidding. Another one we've seen that's been troublesome is masking regions. It's big, big no nos, right?

THOMAS J. KEMP: So, while Sarah's switching over, she's going to jump into Navisworks. And we're not necessarily going to do a click-by-click demo of how to do this. But she's going to go through the features that we use. And we're going to talk about how they relate to one another through this process.

SARAH CAUSEY: Cool. It's working you guys. Good job crossing your fingers. I appreciate it.

So the project we're looking at today-- and I'm sorry I have to sit down. I hope that's OK-- is the Boston University Health Professions building. So this is a building-- does anybody do higher ed work? I know we got Brigham Young in here.

This is a building on Boston University's campus that, as the name implies, health professions, there's a lot of nursing and different medical professions being trained in here. So there's a lot of stuff going on in this building, medical gas, all sorts of systems going through the walls. So we thought this might be a good example of a project we could show you.

So we're looking at my live .NWF. This is my federated model I'm using right now. And as Tom said, I'm going to go through a couple of things that have made our workflow work. And hopefully it can encourage you to jump start your process. But I'm not going to go into everything. But feel free to come up at the end if we want to go through stuff.

So we're going to start by going over a couple of things that we can standardize and automate. I think this is really important for making this realistic in the design phase. Somebody earlier mentioned time as a reason why we don't coordinate. So we're going to try to make the case today that it's worth it, and that it's not taking up too much time. And we'll see at the end if you buy it or not.

So the first thing I'm going to talk about is the difference between merge and append. The gentleman over here who talked earlier about NWS, that's what merge is for. So if you have two federate models working at the same time, or even .NWDs, two distributed models you want to merge, that's what that button's for.

Most of the time when we're working with our consultants that are giving us .NWCs, we're going to use append. So all that's going to bring in is everybody's .NWC. And as long as they exported it the way we agreed, they should come in origin to origin. If not, then we got to talk to them about what that means. So you're seeing here my selection tree, my architectural model.

THOMAS J. KEMP: And that append is like a link.

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah.

THOMAS J. KEMP: So when that .NWC gets updated, and you open the model again, you've got that updated model.

SARAH CAUSEY: Thank you, Tom. That's right. So, you can see here in my tree, I've got architecture, structure, MEP. There's my Rooms.

And it really is a tree. You can expand every single element that came over from Revit. So that's my selection tree. And that's how I get my models in here. So the next thing we're going to go to-- and by the way, that's number three on that wheel, that wheel that we showed earlier, that prevention process.

The next thing we're going to talk about is sets. So there's a couple ways we can manage sets. And sets are super important because we use them for a lot of the steps I might talk about today.

So there's two types of sets. You can see there's a little-- there's two icons up here. One is its first selections. One is for searches.

So let me tell you a little bit about the difference. A selection set is a set of elements that have been selected either manually or through the Selection Tree we were just looking at. So we can grab things, hold the Control key, grab whatever we need, and save that as a selection.

Search sets, on the other hand, is a set of elements defined by search criteria. So we use what's going on down here in the find items window. And if I look at-- let me go to cold water here. You can see I have set up criteria in my find items to look through all of the elements in my selection tree and grab the things that fit the criteria. It's like filters in Revit, something like that.

And since we exported all that metadata from our Revit model, we're able to grab all sorts of things. We can grab families. We can grab Geo ID numbers. We can grab-- here we have element system classification has the word cold water in it.

So we've tried to really standardize our sets. We are exclusively using search sets a RATIO. The reason why, if you're with me on the difference between selection set and search set, if your consultant or if you are adding elements or deleting elements, and they weren't part of your selection, they're not going to be coordinated too. And we're going to use these same sets in our clash detective.

Whereas if we use a search set, is going to rerun a search for all the stuff that matches that criteria and grab it anew. Does that make sense? Cool.

I'm just going to prove to you that this works so that you believe me. And I'm going to grab these three systems here. And I'm going to hide everything else. So you can see it's actually looking for my hot water, my cold water, my sanitary lines.

It looks cool, right? I love it. We like to joke that Navisworks looks like a '90s video, so I don't know. So I'm going to just go back to where we can see everything, so now that I proved to you that they really do work. And as long as everybody's with me on sets, we're going to move on here.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Can you go back to the sets real quick?

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah, go for it. I know what you're going to say.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Where is the export?

SARAH CAUSEY: Right up here.

THOMAS J. KEMP: So that's the key to making this work. We've set this all up, we've done this work once, export it out. Next time you do this, bring it in.

You don't have to set it up for every project. We set these up once, and we've used pretty much the same sets on every project. Sometimes there are some different requirements. But it's a good baseline starting point.

SARAH CAUSEY: That's right. It just comes out as .XML, super easy peasy.

AUDIENCE: So in there, you set that up once, and imports on all present projects.

THOMAS J. KEMP: When you import it back, when you import it into the your next .NWF file, same search sets work.

SARAH CAUSEY: Yeah, there we go, bingo. We already saved ourselves time. So now that we know we've got our sets set up, or we've started a brand new project, and we've appended our files, and we've imported our search stats from the last time we set it up, we're ready to go.

Next, we're going to look at how we got these colors. I want you to just know-- I don't want to show you because then I'd have to slow us down. And we don't have too much time. But when you first start a Navisworks model and you first append those .NWCs, everything's gray. Everything's gray.

If you have materials that are showing up in the shaded visual style in your Revit 3D view, those will come over. You'll get those colors. But what we've decided to do to keep everybody familiar with what's going on, and we think it's pretty easy way to look at it, is establish a standard for what's called the Appearance Profiler in Navisworks.

So it's under the Home tab and over here on the right, Appearance Profiler. And there's a couple different ways you can do it. But we decided, hey, let's save ourselves time. Let's use those sets we were just looking at. These are the exact same sets.

And these are some colors that we've established at RATIO that we like. Structure's yellow. Architecture's gray. And we've set it to 35% transparent so we can see through the walls. Hot water is red. Cold water's blue. We haven't found yet a standard coloring scheme for Navisworks. If anyone finds one or if anyone knows of one in the room, I would love-- or maybe we can come up with that here in this room.

THOMAS J. KEMP: Let's make this the standard. So everyone just start using this.

SARAH CAUSEY: See how efficient Tom is? So these are just the colors we use. And once we set this up once, we can save it out. It's a .dat file, and then load it on the next project. So you just set this up once. You're using the same search sets, using the same colors. You just saved yourself half an hour.

And then you just click Run. And it color codes to what you're seeing here. This is where we're getting all these different colors.

I want to just clarify something that if you're thinking about it-- I don't know-- if there are elements that are actually in two of these sets, because that's possible, you might have some sets that you really like to set up and there's an element that's in both, what happens is it's going to iterate in order. So if an element's in the structure, and it's also in, I don't know, something else, it's going to get the first color. And then when it hits it again, it's going to change to the second color.

And you can't actually change this order. There's no up and down in here. So you got to be conscious of that. It's just what it is for now, I guess. So we try not to have stuff in two search sets for that reason.

So we've got our sets, we've got our colors, now I'm going to show you how we set up our Save Viewpoints. Now, this is not something that is exportable. But I'm going to show you stuff that we set up really quick for every project we do. And these are some folder structures that we use. The first-- if you can see-- can everybody see the screen OK?

The first is by level. All we did is took a section box just like in Revit, we use the sectioning tools. And I like to use the box and cut out each level. So we can at each level snapshot.

This is really good, we talked about earlier, orienteering. So if we're down looking at a clash real tight, and the team's like, I do not know what we're looking at, you can quickly just go, I'm going to go to the fourth floor, and then zoom back into what we're looking at. Does that makes sense? So those are pretty quick to set up. And we like those.

And the next is key areas. So this is typically used for areas you know you've got tight spots. Maybe you haven't even started clashing yet, but you're like, I know that I'm going to have to look in this area and see what's going to hit. So that's what key areas is for.

Next is section views. So we typically use these to grab big, big sections of the building corridors, mechanical runs that are traveling from floor to floor. And then last is issues. So these we're going to get into a little bit more. But these are highlighting the exact clash areas we want to look at in our coordination meetings each week. Everybody with me?

THOMAS J. KEMP: In setting those, especially the by level and key areas, that really makes that coordination meeting, when you're in that meeting navigating around the model, really speeds that up, makes that a lot more efficient, makes it easier to navigate through the model without trying to fumble around and control a section box or anything.

SARAH CAUSEY: We're going to get into the clash prevention. Are we ready? This is the coolest part, I think. This is the whole point.

Mostly to this point, we've gotten into setup. And setup is important. And once you do it once, hopefully you're able to implement that on your next time. Oops, lost my mic.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] mic on?

SARAH CAUSEY: Oh, I like that. I like it. You should come to all-- you should just hang around me and comment on my life. I like it.

So these are some clashes we did in this particular file. In a second, we're going to talk about our standard because you're seeing a real project right now. And it's been built on from our standard.

So right now, we're looking at the MEP versus structural clash. And remember, this is clash prevention. These are design intent models.

And we're clashing big things, like all of MEP versus all of structure, which sounds insane. But I'm going to show you how we manage it. And I know in Tom's example, 53,000 clashes is a little scary.

So the big, big thing I want you to take away, if you're going to approach this is for us, we have found that grouping crashes by level works. Let me show you what I mean. If I'm just going to look here at clashes on the second floor-- let me turn my section stuff off.

If I'm just going to look specifically at one clash at a time-- let me just focus in on something here. There you go-- that may not mean a whole lot to me. And actually, in my opinion, this would be a false clash because I'm not going to modify the floor boundary for every single floor penetration. That's crazy town.

So this maybe doesn't mean so much to me. And think about the hours that I might spend going through every single one of these. So the way that we've found that's been useful to us is grouping them by level. And there's a pretty quick way we can do that.

For this example, the second level, so I'm just going to grab one of my guys on the second level. And I'm going to right click and say, quick filter by level equal second level. And it's going to go through all the clashes in this particular test and group for me just what's on the second level.

You can see some of these are new, some of these are existing. I'm going to do the good old Shift key, grab them all, right click and group. It's really that simple.

And then I'm going to name it 02 second level. And the reason why is because it likes to do, just like in Excel, it likes to do alphabetical order sorting. So by putting that number prefix in there, I'm able to sort by level. So you're seeing I'm still only seeing the second level clashes, so I've just got to filter that, and then they're all there together.

Now, you may be thinking, what is she talking about? But I think it's easier to see everything in a glimpse at once. Look at all of these clashes that are not actually meaningful to me.

So this isn't showing me a whole lot. So I'm going to switch over to our mechanical versus ceilings and show you the fourth floor because this one is a little bit better. Let me make this bigger for you. Now I'm able to look at context and say, OK, he's probably are fine. They are truly penetrating the ceiling.

But look at this whole run. Rather than analyzing this as 10 or 20 different clashes for every single model piece of duct, I know real quick, OK, we just got to move the ceiling or the whole run. And now we've resolved all those clashes. So if you're with me, you can see how this works pretty fast.

And just to reiterate again, the goal is not to find everything. The goal is to do clash prevention. So get us the best model we can out the door, save us some time and money. I do want to explain how these clashes are set up because I think that's important. So I'm going to just spend a couple of minutes here explaining how these clashes work.

If you can still see my screen, at the bottom here, we are actually using those same search sets that we did before. You can actually set up a clash detection in a variety of ways. You can use Properties. You can use things in the Selection Tree. Since we already saved those sets, we're using the sets again-- bingo, done.

And the thing that I want you to look at down here at the bottom is the settings. So these are some interesting things. We're just going to share you what we do a RATIO. And you can run wild when you get in here.

There are four types of clash settings. Now remember, we're on step four of that wheel. Four is a good number.

There are four clash types-- hard, hard conservative, clearance, and duplicates. Duplicates is pretty self-explanatory, two of the exact same thing on top of each other. Navisworks knows they're the same.

Let's eliminate those clashes. Or let's find those and fix those in our model. I think someone mentioned earlier about two consultants modeling the same doors in the same place or the same ceilings in the same place. That would help you eliminate those, catch those.

Hard is exactly what it sounds like. You set a tolerance over here on the right. And anything that is that tolerance or greater is a clash. So let me explain what I mean here.

We typically start with six inches as a tolerance. So something like this, where the beam and the light fixture, this MEP consultant was awesome and modeled in the clearance that they needed for the housing for the fixtures. So we're able to see, bingo, they're hitting. That's a problem. And that is without any fire protection.

So this is a hard clash. We usually start is six inches. And then when we feel good about our coordination, we get down to three. And when we feel real good about it, if we have time, we go down to one inch. And we stop there.

Now remember, these are design intent models, not fabrication models. We decided to stop at one inch because hopefully our contractors are coordinating this further with the fabrication models to a finer level. Now the tricky part is hard and hard conservatives. So I just want to explain this quick. Hard conservative is actually going to clash-- sometimes flag false clashes.

So all of the geometry in Navisworks is made up of triangles. So you may have two pipes parallel to each other. And if you run a hard clash test, it might say, they're not touching. But in reality, it's because the triangulation of the geometry is not touching.

So if you run a hard conservative, which is, as the name implies, more conservative, it'll catch that. But you're risking-- you may get some false clashes. Does that make sense?

And then the last one is clearance. So remember hard, when you said that tolerance, it's going to go the tolerance or greater it's going to flag it. Clearance is that tolerance or less. So we usually use clearance for fire protection around columns or lighting if our fire consultants are not modeling clearances around housing. We've got a lot of recessed light fixtures, we'll run a clearance of those lighting elements.

And again, just to reiterate, these clash tests are also exportable. So again, we've got the same search sets. We've got an appearance profile. The colors are set up. And we can export these clashes.

I want to show you a little bit of evolution of what you're seeing on the screen to where we are now. So I'm going to hop back, back into PowerPoint. We did so good you guys. The Revit gods, the Navisworks gods they're on our side.