Have you ever wondered how to increase the image resolution exported by Navisworks during a Clash Report?

You can set this in the Registry, look in bottom left corner of image for the location of this key:

nwclimg

Also note, Navisworks 2016 is 13.0 in the Registry.

More Navis tips:
What Revit Wants: Thirteen Navisworks Tips to Boost your Productivity for 2014

This recent post on Dynamo Nodes shows how a simple Navisworks Search Set can be built by Dynamo running inside of Revit:
Create Navisworks Search Set XML for Element Ids | Dynamo Nodes

In the first release, this node just uses Element Ids to build a long ‘orsearch set, but this basic idea could easily be extended and adapted to more closely connect Revit to Navisworks search workflows through Dynamo.

Here is a Screencast:

XML files are everywhere. And in the BIM world, we have to deal with a range of different xml file schemas, such as BCF, Navisworks Clash Reports and Viewpoints, and so forth. Hiding inside these XMLs there is some very useful information. For example, BCF files often have Element IDs in the viewpoint.bcfv component, and Navisworks XML files often have point XYZ values. Can we easily get access to this information for use in Dynamo, and then in Revit?

Yes, we can! There were one or two ways to do this in Dynamo before, but here is my take on it…

Dynamo ships with IronPython, which in turn ships with an XML handler called ElementTree. I have created some basic nodes that give us access to ElementTree functions in Dynamo. Along the way, I learnt a bit about encoding and character sets. It turns out that Navisworks often inserts tricky characters into the XML (like the diameter symbol), so as a workaround (for now) I do a string encoding roundtrip to get rid of these problematic characters. In the same node, I create the ElementTree object: this is a special object that essentially represents structured information about the XML data. The initial import looks like this:

Once we have this ElementTree object in hand, we can start to do some interesting things, like:
Iterate through tree to get individual XML elements

iterate-4268193

and Show a hierarchical representation:

With the individual elements, we can Get Attribute names and values, and the Get the children of those elements:

Obviously, you can immediately do some nice lookups against these lists in Dynamo, depending what information you want. However, on large XMLs this can be quite slow. Happily, ElementTree provides some basic XPATH support, which looks a bit like this:

With the XPATH support and an understanding of the xml hierarchy, I have created a node to do XPATH calls straight to the ElementTree object:

Now that we can ‘snip’ out useful information from the XML, we can do interesting things with it, like make some points:

When it comes to BCF, its a little bit more challenging. I haven’t figured out how to unpack the bcfzip directly to memory (yet), so we have do that manual step first. Once we have a ‘folder’ from the BCFZIP, we can get the bcfv files from inside it and then get information from them, like this:

So, in the latest Bakery package are the nodes needed to read a variety of XML files, get information from them, and do some useful things with that information. It was a learning experience for me, and I hope its useful to you 🙂

version-9817403

If you use a 3Dconnexion mouse with Navisworks, and you have installed the latest drivers (which I highly recommend), you may struggle to find out how to map a Spacebar to a button on your Spacemouse. Obviously, in Navis it is important to be able to hold down the Space key for selection purposes. If you try to record a macro for Spacebar in the 3Dconnexion management menu, you will find that it has both a ‘press’ and ‘release’ action.

You need to use the Keyboard list to map a key press correctly. However, Spacebar does not appear in the default menu… Happily, you can directly modify your profile XML to map the KB_Space action to a button on your 3d mouse. The images below show where to find this file, and how to edit it:

This method will fix the ‘press and release’ nature of macros, meaning you can “hold” the 3d mouse button for a Spacebar or Shift+Spacebar multiselection in Navisworks.

EDIT Good discussion about using a 3D mouse with Navisworks on LinkedIn

I thought it might be useful to set up a shared folder to allow Navisworks users to upload, download and share resources. The idea here is that lots of Navisworks resources (as listed below) can be exchanged and re-used on future projects. Why should we all keep reinventing the wheel?

Only invited users can upload, while any user can view and download the content. Note: if you are an uploader, keep in mind that this will be globally accessible, so you need to be aware of any IP considerations that may apply. At this point, I’m considering this to be “open source” (with associated licensing conditions). Additionally, I am keeping the guidelines to a minimum, just feel free to share something if you think others could make use of it.

Anyhow, here it is:
Shared Folder Link

There is a readme with some basic guidelines at:
this link

If you would like to be a contributor, feel free to contact me via comment, on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Here is an initial list of the things that I think will be worth sharing (but there will be more added):

  • Appearance Profiler DATs
  • Clash Test XMLs
  • Find Items XMLs
  • NWF Templates
  • Search Set XMLs
  • Settings XMLs
  • Workspace XMLs

I have posted about KiwiCodes Bonus Tools before, particularly the Excel and data tools. A Sheet Revisions manager has recently been added to the toolset. Check out how quick and easy it is to add revisions to sheets with this:

Honestly, if you have $35 to spend on Revit addins, this Bonus Tools package is definitely what I would spend it on…

Versions for 2013, 2014 and 2015 in one install package:
Bonus Tools | Autodesk Revit | Autodesk Exchange Apps

Video playlist showing all of the Bonus Tools in action:

 

Clash Report XML to Revit:

Exporting Navisworks View Names Directly to Text:

  1. Download SysExporter
  2. Open a Navisworks project
  3. Open SysExporter
  4. Look for a TreeView Entry with same number of items as you have views
  5. Choose Columns – untick everything except String
  6. Select (using Shift) all of the view names you want to export in the list
  7. Right-click, Copy Selected Items (Tab Delimited)
  8. Paste into email or other software of choice

Quickly deleting all of your Navisworks sets (search sets etc) without waiting to select all the Items:

  1. Left click on last item in Sets list
  2. Hold down Shift
  3. Right click on top item in Sets list
  4. Click Delete

In Navisworks 2015, use Gourad Shader Style, Full Lights, Render set to Low:

Firstly, export the Viewpoints you want to rename to XML.

Open the XML in Notepad++.  Now we are going to use Search – Replace to append something to the view name in the XML file.  Once we get the Find syntax correct (I used view name=”View), you can just use a backslash 1 in the Replace box to signify the Find result, and then add whatever you like after that.  See the image:

 (make sure you pick the Regular Expression radio button)

Click Replace All, then save the XML (make sure you just click save, and don’t click Save As).  Now, import it back into your Saved Viewpoints in Navisworks.

 This is what it looks like in Navisworks after re-importing the XML:

Keep in mind that the import / export process will result in your Hide/Required and Override Material boxes becoming unticked for each imported view.

This is another good reason that you should be using Appearance Profiler by now… Have you noticed Presenter has now been completely replaced by Autodesk Rendering in Navisworks 2015?

More on Notepad++ renaming:
regex – How do you do a Find and Insert in Notepad instead of a replace, while using regular expression? – Stack Overflow

Navis uses XML as a data interchange format for almost “everything”. 

However, it sometimes doesn’t offer the greatest editing experience for that same data in the vanilla UI.  You will find that various users are direct-editing these XML files to streamline workflows in a number of different scenarios.

Here is a simple example – in the Quick Properties / Definitions options in Navisworks, it is not immediately obvious how you can re-sort this list.  However, you can export that settings node to XML, and then use a graphical XML Editor like EditiX to view the schema and drag the nodes into the order that you prefer (see image).  Then, save the XML and then import back into Navisworks…

Download at:
http://www.freexmleditorsite.com/download.html

Do you have a XML editing workflow that improves your Navisworks experience?  Feel free to comment!