Discover how Navisworks software can aid in clash organization by reducing the number of clashes and creating simple, easy-to-read clash reports. This guide focuses particularly on the use of a technique called clash grouping to assist in achieving this.
Key Insights
- This article provides a guide on how to use Navisworks software to organize clashes by grouping similar clashes together. Clash grouping helps in creating easy-to-read clash reports and reducing the number of clashes shown.
- Techniques such as enabling and disabling the visibility of clashes, creating groups for different clash sets, and using selection filters to highlight specific clash sets are explained in detail.
- Clash grouping allows the viewing of more than one clash on-screen at a time, and the article demonstrates how to create groups, select multiple clashes, and view clashes within a group for better clash organization.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video we'll be starting a short series on clash organization and we'll be using the BIM361 complete model in the lesson 6 folder. Last time we used this model we ran a series of clash batches and the result of running those batches gave us some pretty high numbers of clashes.
So the purpose of clash organization is to reduce the number of clashes essentially to create a simple and easy to read clash report overall. One of the ways that we'll be reducing the number of clashes shown is by using clash grouping and among the many other tools that we can use clash grouping is the one we will be focusing on mostly for this video. Let's begin with the structural versus plumbing clash.
So once you have the structural versus plumbing batch selected let's drop into the results tab and make sure that your visibility is matching mine. I currently have item one item two turned on and highlight all clashes checked on as well as dim other and transparent dimming. Clash grouping is useful because it allows us to group like clashes together to make an easy to read report.
It also allows us to reduce the number of clashes shown and it allows us to view more than one clash on screen at a time while also allowing us not to highlight all clashes. When we have highlight all clashes turned on we see all of the clashes in the entire batch. If we check it off then we see none of the clashes except for the one that we have selected.
If we select multiple clashes then the only clash that's shown is the last one that we selected. In this case is clash five. Don't expect that clash one through five will show if you have them all highlighted.
%20(1).png)
Learn CAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
If you would like to see a small selection of clashes at one time what you can do is group them all together and you do that by selecting all the clashes. You can right click on them in the go to group. You'll see that we have a new group.
You don't have to label it now this is just an example but now that new group is actually showing all of our clashes that we have inside that group. Now if we turn on hide other we can see those clashes much more clearly. This is a great way to start our selection filter which will help us reduce the number of clashes by allowing us to clash or to group specific clashes.
If you no longer like to see these clashes within your group you can either select them individually and drag them out or you can select the group right click and then go to explode group. The group now doesn't exist and the clashes that were in that group are now part of the root of our clash batch. Let's turn on highlight all clashes and dim other again.
There are some limitations to what highlight all clashes can perform. One of the problems is that if you turn on hide other and highlight all clashes highlight all clashes doesn't really make any sense anymore. Hide other is overriding it and we're only seeing the clash that we have selected.
But there is a way to hide other and see all of our clashes not using highlight all clashes and that's by using groups. If we select all of our clashes by selecting the first one and then selecting the last one holding down shift, right click and then group. Now we've we are effectively seeing only the clashes.
We can turn off highlight all clashes just to demonstrate and all of our clashes without the model shown can all be selectively visible. This is very useful if you want to simply select whole areas like all of these slabs. With the dim other it's really hard to select specific things because there's usually model elements in front of those things that you want to select.
So a useful thing to do while you are organizing your clashes is to create one group and I like to call this group something with an underscore. We'll call it unsorted. The reason I put an underscore in front of it is because when we sort by name and we have other clash groups then this one will go to either the top or the bottom depending on how we're organizing our name ascending or descending.
If we leave it as new folder then we can often get confused by what we have grouped as the entire model and what we have just created as a new group. Now before when we were looking at our model we were looking very quickly at the structural versus plumbing model and I noted that the slabs were all clashing but we don't actually have holes cut out in our slabs since it's just a coordination item that is it's too small to coordinate between so many trades. So oftentimes you'll see vertical pipes going through slabs and these are I would consider acceptable clashes.
So to weed these clashes out what we'll have to do is select each of the slabs individually. So take your selection tool you can select it via your view panel or in the home tab under select and search. Here's your search tool or your select tool.
Select the first slab, hold down control, select the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Next we're going to use the selection filters. Selection filters are located right here in this button.
Right now it's set to none so we're not filtering anything. We can change this to exclusive or inclusive. If we use exclusive it'll show the clashes where the two items that's item one and two are both clashing with each other.
That means that we have to have them both selected. If we use inclusive we only have to have one of the items of the two items selected and so that's the one that we'd want to use for these slabs since we're not selecting the pipes. Now our filter is active and we don't see any difference yet in our clash batch because all of the clashes are underneath the group.
If you expand that group like I've just done you'll see that the selected clashes that are the ones under gray, these are all of the clashes that are related to the slabs that we have selected but not related to both the slabs and the pipes since we have inclusive set. You'll probably notice that there are fewer clashes that are showing here than we were initially showing without the filter active and that's just because all of the other clashes that are not related to the slabs are just currently not showing. So let's put all of the clashes that are currently filtered into a new clash group.
We'll do this very similarly to the way that we did it before by selecting the first clash, scrolling all the way down, selecting shift, and click the last clash, and then right click and go to group. You see that it calls this new group. Let's change this name to okay, actually let's make it okay one in case we make it okay two.
We're going to change the status of this later when we get into the status section. Next we want to turn off our filter so we see all of our clashes and now we see that under okay one we have all of these slabs and if we select the unsorted group then we have all of the rest of our clashes. A quick note, the number of clashes that are currently showing has changed.
We currently have two and that's because we have two groups. It doesn't count any of the clashes that are underneath the groups. This is of course not our final count but it's our working count as we create more groups, but we can now continue on to the next series of clashes.
The next thing that you want to do is to look for like clashes. For example, these four clashes against steel beams can be classified as similar clashes. They're all the same conditions but on different floors and even the fourth one on the bottom can be grouped into its own clash group because a change in elevation of this pipe may resolve all of these other clash beams, rather clashes with these other beams.
So let's use our selection and weed out these three first and then the bottom one last. Using our select tool we can select the steel beams and then we can select our inclusive clash filter. Select all of the clashes that are involved and then group.
We can call this one group one. Next we'll take off the inclusive clash filter. Select unsorted again and you'll see that those three are now gone.
Then we can select this pipe and this pipe. Change our filter, select all the clashes and group. Call this one group two.
Sometimes if you don't take off the filter before you select your unsorted group then Navisworks is going to ask you if you'd like to remove the filter since it's not detecting any clashes within that group. If you hit okay then it'll just take off the filter and make it none. That's a perfectly okay thing to do.
Next let's take a quick break from this go ahead and save your file under lesson four and I'll be continuing the next portion of this lesson in the next part. So you can keep your file open or close the file and then reopen in the next video. We'll be continuing in part two.