Ah, the spring time (in the United States anyway) when the weather starts to change (unless you live in the Midwest like me, still feels like December!) and Autodesk rolls out the new products. Navisworks has some nice features in 2014 and this should be an interesting year talking to customers about the new features.
The guys over at Beyond Design put together a nice little list of the key features in Navisworks 2014. You can read their post HERE.
Taking a step away from the key features they show, here’s a little list (not a complete list) of some of the other things you’ll see in Navisworks 2014…
- Timeliner Selection Set Export
- This is interesting…you can export your Task List to create a folder of Selection Sets that match the name of the Tasks. The Sets are then automatically attached to the Tasks. At this point, you’d need to add items to each Selection Set.
- This should make attaching/mapping objects to tasks much, much easier!
- Timeliner Format Update
- You can now utilize Primavera P6 v8.2! (this was a big issue with 2013)
- Preserve Clash Highlighting in Viewpoints reporting
- A feature that sneaked into 2013 via SP2 was the ability to save your Clash Report to Viewpoints and keep the visual fidelity of the Clash View. Well, it’s native in 2014! You even have the ability to choose if you want that functionality via a checkbox. It even keeps the Redlines! (which it didn’t in 2013)
- Clash Elements Different Colors
- Basically, you can set Item 1 and Item 2 to be different colors instead of them both using the Clash Status color.
- Clash Comments
- The Clash Results now include a column that shows if a Clash has a Comment and how many.
- Clash Filters
- You can filter the Clashes to only show what you currently have selected. New for 2014…
- Exclusive – if you have the 2 clashing elements selected, this will show clash results where both of the clashing items are included in your current item selection.
- Inclusive – if you have 1 or 2 clashing elements selected, this filter will show clash results where one or both or the clashing items are included in your current item selection.
- I can see people using the Inclusive quite a bit.
- Clash Report Filter
- If you have a Filter applied to your Clash Results, you can export a Report of just the Filtered Clashes.
- Clash Isolation Settings
- The Dim Other and Hide Other are no longer part of a drop-down menu, they are buttons next to each other.
- Measurements (Nice enhancements here!)
- We can now do measurements were we can lock the X, Y or Z axis from the first point selected.
- We can now measure in a Perpendicular (huge!) or Parallel alignment to the surface of an object.
- I’ll definitely be doing a video for this one soon!
- We also get some new visual cues when selecting a Face (small rectangle behind the cursor), Edge (small line behind the cursor) or Point (an “X” behind the cursor).
- The visual cues replace the cursor changing, the cursor now keep a “+” as it’s graphic.
- Rendering
- Wow, there sooooo much to this now that we can use the same Materials as the other Autodesk software and the same rendering engine.
- We also get the Ray Trace tool that was introduced in Revit 2013.
- Sectioning
- You can now “limit” your sectioning planes/box to elements you have selected.
- Oh, this is nice when you want to show a section cut and the limit to be 1st Floor to 2nd Floor!
So throw list together with what the guys and Beyond Design have (Quantification, Rendering, ReCap (point clouds), etc.) and that’s pretty much what your going to see in Navisworks 2014!
Oh, I should note…Clash items listed above are only available in Navisworks Manage, everything else will be available in Navisworks Simulate as well.
More to come soon once I get Navisworks loaded on my main computer 
