Thursday, January 30, 2014

BIM 360 Field Update Coming

If you use Autodesk BIM 360 Field, you’re going to be seeing some changes very soon around how documents, specifically PDF’s, are handled when viewing them on the iPad.

When you login to Field, you’ll be seeing a message that looks like the image below…

Field_PDF Update

Now, I know many of you will be asking the question; “when is the update going to be live?”  If I knew, I’d tell you.  As with anything Autodesk pushes out for updates, the date is held confidential.  If I had to guess, it’s going to be a few weeks.  I’m sure they are pushing this notice out so that people can be prepared because you’ll need to do some “upgrading” to your documents, just like the notice says (second line from the bottom).  The upgrade is actually a one-time re-sync of your Document Library, so it’s going to take a bit longer to sync your iPad when you choose to do so. You do have the ability to wait to upgrade the Library (see below), so please choose carefully.  Just remember, once the Document Library gets updated, everyone on that project is going to have to do the re-sync of the Library to the iPad.

Field_PDF Update2

If you are going to update the Library on your iPad, I’d do this while connected to a good, strong, reliable wireless connection to make sure the update goes all the way through.

Autodesk BIM 360 Products

So I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog front this year (that’s kind-of an understatement!).  It’s not that I don’t have much to share, but it seems like every day passes way too fast.

The main reason though for my practical non-existence in the blogging world is that in the summer of 2013, I started the trek down the BIM 360 road with Glue and Field.  I was one of only a select few that were chosen by Autodesk to partake in being trained on the BIM 360 products in the US. The BIM 360 products are not like the majority of the Autodesk software and Autodesk didn’t release these products to all of the channel partners/resellers.  So much of my time that I have “free” (time that I’m not spending with customers around a handful of products), I’ve been diving into BIM 360 Glue and Field

I’ve tossed around how I wanted to share my knowledge around BIM 360 Glue and Field.  The biggest question I was asking myself was whether or not I wanted to keep this blog just Navisworks info or if I wanted to turn it into more of a Navis/BIM 360 blog.  Well, I’m going to do the latter.  With both product lines having some similarities/differences and being able to work together, I figured it was best to keep the info all in one place.

So in the near future, you’re going to start to see BIM 360 information along with Navisworks on this blog.  Hopefully I can also start to clear the air a little on the many questions people have around BIM 360 Glue and Field compared to Navisworks…specifically around Glue vs Manage.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Navisworks 2014 Hotfix 3

Autodesk just released a new Hotfix for Navisworks (all flavors) and it fixes/resolves the following issues…

- Problems resulting from operations that involve clicking in the first column of the Clash results grid, such as collapsing/expanding groups, dragging clashes and resizing columns.
- Issues with material and transparency inconsistency when importing FBX files.
- Issues with the automatic selection of the correct Rendering engine (Presenter or Autodesk)

Note: it is not necessary to have installed Navisworks 2014 Service Pack 1 before installing this hotfix

You can download the appropriate version HERE