Navisworks Journal Files

A little while back, I was going through removing my 2013 “stand-alone” products so I could install the Building Design Suite Ultimate 2013 and ran across a folder I didn’t remember seeing in 2012…a Rx folder within an Autodesk folder in my Users directory.  Huh, so I opened it up and there lies a Navisworks 2013 folder…with a Journals folder within it.  Now this is interesting…are they somehow introducing Journal Files for Navisworks like Revit has??

Well, no, not really. From what I can tell, a Journal file is generated when you Append/Open a Revit file in Navisworks 2013.  This Journal file appears to be (my opinion anyway) a “record” of what Navisworks is doing in the background when reading the RVT and creating the NWC. 

And in case you are curious or want to investigate a Revit Journal file that was created when you Appended a Revit file into Navisworks, this is the location it’s located in (Windows 7)…

C:\Users\*USERNAME*\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Rx\Navisworks 2013\Journals

So if you are having issues when loading/Appending in a Revit file into Navisworks 2013, you may want to check out the Journal file to see if there is anything in the Journal that’s pointing to the problem.

Vault and Navisworks 2013

Here are just a couple of the changes that I noticed with Navisworks and Vault 2013…

Yay, we can finally Append from Vault ALL of the file types for Navisworks!

Navisworks 2013 also now includes a Vault Browser window that will show which files are currently Appended into Navisworks, just like the Selection Tree, but will give some indicators that are shown in Vault.  It will also show which files have been Appended from Vault vs a “regular” Append.

The circles that are in front of the file names are the indicators…these will show a few different things.  In the image above, the + sign is indicating that the file is not in Vault.  The empty circle is indicating that this file is in Vault as was Appended via the Vault tools.  There are more, which get’s into more of the Vault functionality…which is a whole other discussion.  Anyway, here’s what the Vault Browser would look like with the files in Vault, Appended from Vault and working on a “checked out” NWF file…

Update to Switchback with Revit 2013

I’ve posted a couple times now about the Switchback feature in Navisworks and how it works with Revit.  Well, there is an update to the functionality for the 2013 release in a good way!

When you now use Switchback with Revit 2013, the camera view that you are using in Navisworks 2013 is now created in Revit…literally.  When in Revit, you’ll be directed to a new 3D View called “Navisworks”.  The nice thing is you don’t have to create this view, it happens automatically.  So if you rename or remove the “Navisworks” 3D View and use Switchback again, you’re going to get another “Navisworks” 3D View in Revit.  This is much, much better that what we got in 2012 where the camera didn’t change much in Revit, or maybe just went to a plan view.

Another change is that the object that you’ve selected in Navisworks 2013 to run Switchback with will now actually be selected in Revit 2013 and show the Properties!  Revit 2012 almost had it, but you had to do a few things to make the properties actually show even though the object was “selected”.

One thing though with the object selection potion of this…your results are going to vary depending on what you have your “Selection Resolution” set to.  When I first tried it, I had the “Selection Resolution” set to “Last Object” and the object selection in Revit wasn’t showing.  So I went back and tried the other options for “Selection Resolution” and the one that you want to use is “First Object”.  By using this “Resolution”, the Revit object will be highlighted and the properties of the object will be available.

Here’s a little video showing the new functionality of the Switchback feature for the 2013 products…

Navisworks and Revit 2013 Switchback

One thing to note for those using Revit 2012 and Navisworks 2013…you have the ability to use Navisworks Switchback 2013 in Revit 2012, but the functionality of the Switchback will be the 2012 functionality.

Navisworks 2013 Selection Tree Changes-Similarities

With the ability to now read Revit files, another change with Revit files is how they are organized in the Navisworks Selection Tree.  In the screen shot below, I’ve laid out some examples to illustrate the differences from 2012 Revit based NWC files (2012 and 2013 NWC), Revit 2013 NWC and Revit RVT files…

As you can see, Revit 2012 will export to a 2013 NWC file, but the organization stays the same as if it was exported to a 2012 NWC file.  So the new organization (of Level->Family Category->Family Type->Instance) is only going to show up when a RVT file is read directly into Navisworks, or you generate a NWC file from Revit 2013.

One thing to note with the above image, it doesn’t show an Append 2012 RVT file (oops).  I can say that it will show just like a Revit 2013 RVT file as shown below…

UPDATE:

Based on a comment I received, I didn’t notice the 2013 RVT and NWC files were named the same.  Since I didn’t refresh the NWF, it probably didn’t matter.  But to be safe, I re-appended the files with different names and the RVT and NWC show the same “structure” of Level, Category, etc. I did however notice that the exported NWC breaks down the Instances a step further than the RVT. Here’s the screen shot…

I didn’t look that closely at the tree before to notice this difference with 2013 Exported NWC’s and RVT’s. The NWC Export Settings and Revit File Reader options are the same, so this is something I want to look into further…

Revit File Reader Options

As I’m sure everyone is aware, Navisworks 2013 can read a Revit file natively.  While this is a nice new feature, I have one “compliant” I would like to file…

Why are the Options different when looking at the Export Options from Revit vs. the File Reader Options in Navisworks?  They aren’t totally different and quite honestly it doesn’t matter since everything is present, but why aren’t the laid out the same??

Here’s the Navisworks 2013 Revit File Reader Options…

And here’s the Revit NWC Exporter Options…

Again, is this a big deal…no.  But, it’s just something caught my eye and to me doesn’t make sense since Navisworks didn’t have the options in the first place.

Oh, and one other thing…you can’t Import/Export the Options from Revit to Navisworks and vice-versa.  The Import only works within the same Options dialog/platform.