AutoCAD Markup and Collaborative Feedback Briefing

VICTORIA MACKINNON: Hello, and thank you for joining the AutoCAD markup and collaborative feedback briefing. My name is Victoria MacKinnon and I'm an AutoCAD product manager, and I'm joined today by John Beltran, and AutoCAD senior software architect. In this class, we will share the current state of affairs for collaboration and markup in AutoCAD. Plus, we will share some of the development work that is in progress to further improve your workflows.

In order for us to share some of those forward-looking concepts, we need to first review the legal safe harbor statement. Some of the forward-looking concepts we share today may not be in development. So please do not make any buying decisions based on what you see in this AU class. While some of these concepts may be in development, we make no guarantees that they will make their way into AutoCAD.

Now that we have the legal business out of the way, let's dive in to markup and collaboration. This class will just cover some of the ways that you can markup and collaborate with your colleagues using AutoCAD. To start, we will review some of the most common ways AutoCAD users collaborate today. Then we're going to dive into some of the new functionality with AutoCAD mobile Sketch, Trace, and Share. We will also give you a sneak peek into some of the work that John and our talented developer teams have been working on with Markup Import and Markup Assist.

As we researched where AutoCAD users spend their time in and outside of AutoCAD, markup and collaboration were at the top of the list. With help from our user researchers and designers, we uncovered some of the insights that we can share with you today. We learned that almost a third of AutoCAD users spend half of their week-- over 20 hours a week-- just drafting based off of markups alone. We also learned that nearly everyone is plagued with this problem. Nearly everyone drafts based off of markups at some point during the week.

We also learned there's a wide variety of how markups are done today. Roughly half of markets are done on paper or brought to you by scanning markups that were done on paper. Another third of AutoCAD users use some sort of digital markup. And then the remaining sum of users use markup tools like those available in and Autodesk stocks or otherwise. What we learned is that AutoCAD will need to continue to support a really diverse set of workflows and preferences. As we review the features, we really hope that there are some areas that may benefit you and your colleagues to improve efficiency and reduce the time from markup to meaningful drafting.

The first feature we're going to dive into is the new Sketch functionality. The AutoCAD mobile app, which is available to all AutoCAD subscribers, introduced the new Sketch feature on iOS which provides a way to collect low-fidelity input in a safe way to collaborate on drawing changes. You can mark up the drawing without fear of altering the existing drawing-- no fat finger mistakes here-- while you are out in the field. This can be done with the touch of a finger or the Apple Pencil. Let's take a look.

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- To show you a quick demo, here's an iPad using Sketch. Once you hit Sketch, you can select the pen and highlighter and the right color. To draw, simply use an Apple Pencil or your finger. Sketch offers an easy way to get low-fidelity markups into the context of your drawing while out in the field.

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Trace, the next feature we will discuss, was first introduced in AutoCAD web and mobile last year and in AutoCAD desktop 2022. The analogy of trace is a virtual collaborative tracing paper that is laid over the top of the drawing, allowing collaborators to add feedback right into the context of the drawing. Trace offers a non-destructive and cross-platform way to users to collaborate from the field or from the office.

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- In this video, I will use AutoCAD web to create a new trace. On the left, you can now see a Trace palette with links to learn more. You can click New Trace to get started. Once a new trace is created, you can see it enables Trace Mode, which acts like another layer more similar to tracing paper on top of the drawing. And once in Trace, simply use annotations or geometry to mark up the drawing. Here, I'm going to add a Rev Cloud and some text to the bottom of this vessel. When complete, simply click the check mark to exit Trace, and save the drawing.

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Share was introduced in AutoCAD desktop 2022. With AutoCAD Share, you can generate a Share link to collaborate with your coworkers or your clients. You can select the level of access, such as View Only or Edit, and send controlled copies of your drawings to you and your team. The Share link opens in the AutoCAD web app, letting you and your team or your clients edit and view CAD drawings even if they don't have AutoCAD installed. With the ongoing AutoCAD web app program, you and your colleagues can also try the web app for free, even if they aren't AutoCAD subscribers.

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- AutoCAD Share is available across all AutoCAD platforms. Here it is in AutoCAD Web. You can see the button on the top right next to Open in Desktop. Once the Share window is opened, you can either allow the receiver to view only, or the ability to edit a copy. Once selected, simply copy the link and paste into your email, Slack, or Teams.

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Now that we have shared the drawing with a collaborator, what if you want to add some feedback or additions to their markups? Cue Trace Contributions. Trace Contributions are actually available today on the AutoCAD web app and mobile app on iOS. It is also in development in desktop. With Trace Contributions, you can provide and respond to feedback quickly across the platforms and in the context of the drawing. And now, in the last video that we shared our drawing with a collaborator, let's watch a demo video about Trace and the new Trace Contributions.

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- When opening a drawing with a new trace, a dialog box on the top right appears. Clicking on the hyperlink will open that new trace. First, let's add a new trace here. We'll speed through a few annotations, just like we did in the first trace demo video. OK. Now, let's revisit the shared trace, Trace 1, which has a Rev Cloud and text at the bottom of the left vessel, then add our own contributions. We'll just add some text and a Rev Cloud.

Now that we have added a new trace and a trace contributions, let's check out the differences in the Visor. In the Visor, with trace 3, you can see Phil Fry was the only contributor. Opening up Trace 1, the contributions, you can see two avatars for two contributions, Phil Fry and Victoria MacKinnon. You can also select the light bulb to turn on and off their contributions.

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JOHN BELTRAN: Thanks, Victoria. Markup Import and Markup Assist. These are two new features that are in development for the next release of AutoCAD. Markup Import will allow you to place markup that you've received from your colleagues as a new trace on top of your drawing. The markup might have been created digitally, such is by adding annotations to a PDF file or by sketching on top of a digital image. Another way you might receive markups is on printed output that's been annotated with colored pens or pencils. In either case, AutoCAD will identify the markup in the image and present it on top of your drawing as a new trace.

Markup Assist helps you to respond to feedback after you've imported it into a trace. Using machine learning, Markup Assist will recognize things like handwritten text and shapes. Once recognized, AutoCAD can assist you with incorporating the feedback by offering you commands and actions that are appropriate for the markup that was recognized. In the next video, we'll walk through an example that explores the Markup Import and Markup Assist capabilities and how you can use them to make responding to feedback more efficient.

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- For our walkthrough of Markup Import and Markup Assist, we're going to show you how you can get your markup into AutoCAD, into a trace environment. And we'll also show you, once it's in that environment, how you can toggle between viewing the drawing and viewing the markup. And well then we'll show you how you can interact with the markup, and how AutoCAD can offer you help in responding to the feedback you're getting. It can help you by inserting text and inserting Rev Clouds and things like that.

For this example, we're going to look at this drawing, which is a typical 2D drawing of a plant process. And in this case, you might imagine it was created by plotting a page out to PDF and then using something like Acrobat Reader or some other tool to digitally add nodes or markup to the plotted output. But this could also have been created by plotting a physical page to a piece of paper and using a colored pen to add your comments or markup to the paper, and then taking a photograph using your cell phone and uploading that to your computer, and then importing the actual photograph.

The key thing about the markup and what you're going to import is that we'll treat everything that is not colored-- we're going to assume that that's the original drawing. And we're only going to be looking at the part of the image or the part of the PDF that is colored-- that's red, yellow, green, and so forth. That's what we're going to be treating as markup when we import it.

Here, in the AutoCAD drawing, you can see that we've pulled up part of the drawing here. And to get things started here, I'm going to go to the Collaborate tab in AutoCAD. And you'll see that we've added a Markup Import button. When I click this, we're going to import the markup into a new trace in the AutoCAD drawing files. Click on the button. You get a little welcome screen here. You see this the first time. And it's just reminding you that, when we do the import, we import them into a new trace. And we will then offer these-- you'll see this later. We identify parts of your markup that we can identify text or boundaries in and offer you ways to get assistance.

If you want to learn more about how we do this processing, the data going to the cloud, you can click here to get more information. We'll choose our markup file. And here is the drawing file with my markup in it. This is actually a JPEG. I click Open. And the import process kicks off, and there we go. A lot happened right there. Let's go over things. First of all, the Trace Palette showed up. This lists all of the traces in your drawing. And a new trace has been created to contain the markup that got imported.

And what we see on screen, you'll notice here, kind of dimmed, is the actual AutoCAD drawing file. That's sort of in the background under the imported markup. And in the foreground, what we see is the plotted output with the digital markup that we added to it, overlaid with some transparency on top of the drawing. The Markup command, the Markup Import command, is still active. And the first thing you have to do is place the markup into your drawing. You want to see the feedback-- the digital markup-- in the context of your drawing, in the right location.

Now, the Import command has logic to automatically place the markup by comparing the image to your current drawing and finding parts that match. And it usually gets it right. I mean, it's pretty good. In this case, just for illustration purposes, we've intentionally shown an alignment that doesn't quite match, because you can also-- we're going to show you how you can place it manually.

In this case, you'll see that this pressure vessel should line up with the purple one in the background, and it's not quite lined up. So we will either-- we, at this point, we can either accept the current placement-- again, the automatic placement didn't quite work. Or we can move a line, rotate scale, and so forth. We're going to move this. And I want to align, let's say-- I'm just going to pick a couple of key locations in the image.

I'm going to pick the corner of the vessel right here and align it to the corner of the vessel and drawing right there. So I click and specify a base point. And then when I click and snap to the underlying geometry, the corresponding location, you'll see that now, things line up. And visually, you can see that the scale is pretty good. The plotted output is matching the underlying drawing. Everything looks good, so we'll accept the placement at that point.

At this point, what we have is-- the markup has been imported and is shown overlaid on top of our drawing. But it can be-- what we really want to see is just the colored markup, just the feedback in the context of our current drawing. We don't actually want to see-- now, we don't need it anymore. We don't want to see that paper background that also got imported. Up here at the top on the Trace Visor-- and this is a visual cue to remind you that you're editing the trace and not the underlying drawing.

There's a Settings button that I can click on. And with Markup Import, once we have the markup in the trace, we can turn that drawing background on and off. If I click here-- what happened there? The black and white portions of the imported markup are now hidden, and all that we're seeing in the trace now is the feedback, or the colored parts of the file that we imported.

And we can toggle that back and forth. If you want to double-check the context of the comments in the context of the original plotted output, we can do that. We can also control its opacity, how transparent it is. And typically, when you're responding to the markup itself, you probably want that paper off so you can see just the feedback in the context of your current drawing.

When the operation completes, we're in Trace Mode with a markup on top, we can-- and any changes we make at this point in Trace will be only in the trace. It won't affect the underlying drawing. That's called Trace Front mode. If you think about it, everything in my trace is on top of everything in my drawing, and I'm working in the trace. The other button on the Visor here allows you to toggle, to bring the drawing in front and put the trace information behind it. And when you're in Trace Back mode, you're working on your main drawing. And that's the mode we want to be in order to act on the feedback.

I'll press this button to toggle to Trace Back mode. And the trace has gone to the background. And because the trace contained imported markup, we automatically enter something called Markup Assist mode. And again, because we're coming into this for the first time, we get a little welcome dialog that tells us a little bit about how this works. I'll just dismiss that, because we'll talk about it now. Because this trace contains markups, we've gone and uploaded those markups to our cloud.

We've done a bunch of machine learning and optical character recognition and recognized shapes and text and things like that within the markup that got uploaded. In addition, visually, we show these parts of your markup that we've recognized with these bounding boxes. If it has recognized markup, the bounding box is a blue dashed line. But there may be parts of your markup that we don't know what to do with. The text was unrecognizable, or maybe the shape didn't correspond to anything that we recognize.

And all of that markup will be enclosed in a dashed gray line. Blue is markup that you can interact with and gray is markup that was in your import, but we don't know what to do with it. You're going to have to respond to that yourself. Let's look at-- and by the way, we can toggle assist mode on and off. When Assist mode is on, we see the bounding boxes. And when Assist mode is off, we hide the bounding boxes. We can toggle those on and off. We've imported this.

Now, how can AutoCAD help me respond to the feedback that I've received? And if we roll over one of these bounding boxes, we'll get a tool tip. You'll see that the tool tip appears and tells us what AutoCAD found. In this case, it found some text. And this is the text that we recognized. The other feedback you'll get when you hover over the bounding box is, you get that little lightning bolt. That's just a visual indicator to remind you that you can click to interact with that markup.

So going to go ahead and click here. And what happens is, we get a-- we get more information. We get a dialog that tells us what text we found right here, and some options. This is the ways AutoCAD can help you with this. Right now, we can insert text by invoking the MLeader command and populating the text for you, we can insert it as MText, or we can copy that text to the clipboard. In the case of text, you can also actually go up into this text box. I'm not going to demonstrate that. And you can modify the text content there if it's not quite what you want.

Now, I'm going to pause here before I actually do this, before I actually insert it as an MLeader. When we respond to a markup with an assist, AutoCAD is going to visually change the representation of that assist to make it dim. We call those drafted markups. And that's just a visual indication that helps you identify rapidly which markups you've responded to and which you haven't. And you can toggle that on and off.

For example, if I didn't want to respond to this at all-- I basically want to ignore it-- then from this Assist dialog down here at the bottom, I can mark this as drafted. And when I market as drafted, you'll see it still visible. I can still roll over it. But it's dim. It's been addressed. And if you want to bring it back, you can mark it as undrafted, as well. I just want to call that out so that, as you see us responding to the assists, you'll see those changes going in.

I'm going to go ahead and insert this as in MLeader. Let's see what that looks like. Click on that button. And then it fires up the MLeader command. You can see that it's showing me the text that it's going to place. And I can specify the start point. I want it to be here, at the portal for this vessel. And I clicked Place the End Leader. And it's placed into the drawing, basically on the current layer, using the current dimension style. And as you can see, again, that Assist in the background has been marked as drafted.

I'm also going to-- let's look at this one down here. I can see that, in this case, AutoCAD found a boundary. We can click through the options on that one. And as you can see, four boundaries, AutoCAD can either insert the boundary as a Rev Cloud or it can use that boundary to select objects in your drawing. It will basically use it as a window or a lasso selection. And any entities that are in that lasso will get selected. And again, I can mark this as drafted or undrafted.

In this case, I want to add a Rev Cloud, so I'll click on the Insert as Rev Cloud button. And as you can see, it placed a Rev Cloud there. Again, it placed it on the current layer with the current entity color for Rev Clouds. And that's it. This last one here, this gray box, I'm going to have to respond to manually. AutoCAD didn't recognize this text. It didn't recognize the dimension here. We don't currently recognize dimensions. At this point, I've done all of the drafting I want to, and I'm ready to exit Trace Mode. So I'll click up here on this check box, which closes the current trace.

And I'm back into my main drawing. And you can see that the editing that I've made to the drawing through the markup has been kept in the drawing. The Rev Cloud is here, the MLeader is here, and I'm no longer seeing the trace. And that's it-- Markup Import and Markup Assist. A quick overview of some of the capabilities of those two features. And Thanks for watching.

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VICTORIA MACKINNON: Thanks, John, for that awesome video about Markup Import and Assist. I'm blown away by the work that the development team has done over the course of the last year, and I hope that you all are as excited about this as I am. We also hope you learned something new about AutoCAD Sketch, Trace, and Share. And if you like this class, please click recommend in the AU portal. Thanks so much for joining us today to chat about markup and collaboration.