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.
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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 was 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 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 1 and Item 2 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 similar 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 you uncheck it, 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 visible is the last one that we selected. In this case, it’s Clash 5. Don’t expect that Clash 1 through 5 will show if you have them all highlighted.
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If you would like to see a small selection of clashes at one time, what you can do is group them all together. You do that by selecting all the clashes. You can right-click on them and choose 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 now displays 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 group specific clashes.
If you no longer want 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 choose 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 do. One of the problems is that if you turn on "Hide Other" and "Highlight All Clashes, " "Highlight All Clashes" doesn’t really apply 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 while holding down Shift, right-click, and then group. Now we've effectively grouped the clashes.
We can turn off "Highlight All Clashes" just to demonstrate, and all of our clashes can be selectively visible, even without the model shown. This is very useful if you want to simply select whole areas like all of these slabs. With "Dim Other, " it’s 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 name this group 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 appear at the top or bottom depending on how we're organizing—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 it’s too small to coordinate across so many trades. So oftentimes you'll see vertical pipes going through slabs, which 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 on 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 1 and 2—are both clashing with each other.
Which means we need to have both items selected. If we use Inclusive, we only have to have one 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, but we don’t see any changes 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—the ones in gray—are all the clashes 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 showing here than we were initially showing without the filter active, and that’s just because all the other clashes that are not related to the slabs are 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, holding Shift, and clicking the last clash, then right-click and go to Group. You’ll see that it calls this "New Group." Let’s name this "okay_1" in case we make an "okay_2."
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_1" we have all of these slabs, and if we select the "unsorted" group, 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 include the clashes inside the groups. This is, of course, not our final count, but it’s our working count as we create more groups. 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 involving 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 the other clashes with these beams.
So let’s use our selection and weed out these three first, and then the bottom one last. Using the 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_1." 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_2."
Sometimes if you don't take off the filter before you select your "unsorted" group, then Navisworks might ask you if you'd like to remove the filter, since it's not detecting any clashes within that group. If you hit OK, 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 4, 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 it in the next video. We'll be continuing in part two.