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…