Explore the step-by-step guide of how to finalize a BIM (Building Information Modeling) project by ensuring all elements are in order and correctly annotated, before converting the completed work into a PDF format. Learn how to make last-minute amendments, such as splitting sections for a cleaner view and adjusting title block sizes, while being cautious of project standards and approval protocols.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed walkthrough of how to finalize a BIM project, including a thorough review of all sheets, making necessary changes like title adjustments, and ensuring annotations are clear and logical.
- When finalizing, the article highlights the importance of adhering to project standards and seeking necessary approvals before making any significant changes, such as adjusting the size of the title block.
- The article covers how to export the finalized BIM project into a PDF format, ensuring all views are visible and of high quality, and emphasizing the need to allow sufficient time for this process due to the large amount of information being exported.
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.
In our previous video, we went ahead and finished up our schedules. In this next video, I want to go ahead and just peruse through our sheets real quickly, make sure everything looks good, and then we'll PDF it and have it ready for the end of the class.
So I'm going to go look at my plumbing title sheet. We have our nice little 3D view here—kind of giving everything—our plumbing legend—looks good. We're going to go ahead on our sheet, please change where it says BIM 322 midterm.
Go ahead and change it to BIM 322 final. There we go. I'm going to go to my first floor plumbing and that will be the same on every sheet.
We have our callouts. Those are being shown. That's great.
Our second floor plumbing. We have our callout there. Great.
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Everything else is looking good. If you wanted to adjust some of these, the classroom tags or other elements, you could spend a little time doing that. One thing that you can do with the sections that I’ve seen done in a lot of places is they split these.
So you could go ahead and split these so that the lines are not going over all of your annotations and everything. It makes the view a little cleaner but still communicates what we need it to. I will say that that does need to be done on a per-sheet basis.
So you'd have to go back to your first floor plumbing plan and do the same exact thing. I usually have it just go into the building slightly, but it gets a line out of there, which surprisingly, if you just zoom out and now look at it, looks a lot cleaner. I'm going to go into my plumbing sections.
Everything here is looking good. We're good there. My plumbing enlarged plans.
We have the bathrooms that we annotated and the mechanical room. We have our plumbing details that we pulled in via the Insert 2D Views from File tool. And we talked about that.
We have our plumbing schedules that we just finished creating. Obviously, you know, there's a big sheet with small schedules. However, in a project sense, you're going to have a ton of stuff there.
And then our plumbing isometric that we created using our full 3D view—everything looks good. I'm going to double check on this, just my crop region, make sure it's all good. So it looks like we're pretty good.
Again, remember this view is locked and in a locked 3D view. We will not be able to put the annotations in if we did not have the locked 3D view. We can turn off our crop region and there we go.
Oh, I forgot to look at one thing. I just want to double check and make sure that our sheet titles and everything are fitting nicely. So I'm just going to double-click back through here real quick.
So our plumbing enlarged plans—that text is a little tight. So let's see what we can do about that. I'm going to go ahead and hit Edit Family.
Let's double-check the title block real quick. Let's see—the sheet name is all the way, but we can make the tag possibly just slightly smaller. We’re at 3/8 inch.
Let's take it down to 1/4 inch, which is probably a little bit more appropriate. So I just selected that. All I need to do is load it back into my project and overwrite the existing version.
And there we go. We've changed that scale—just that size slightly. That’s one way of doing it.
We may have to edit this name. We can also just say, this is just Enlarged Plans. We know it’s part of the plumbing set because it’s in the P series, but there are many other things we could do there.
That’s one way of doing it though. And it’s a quick and easy way to do it. If that is the project standard, don’t edit your title blocks unless you get approval from the BIM manager or whoever else. It’s a quick and easy thing to do.
But I’ve run into projects where sometimes people are very particular about their type sizes and their font sizes. So make sure that that is good to go. Everything there is good—plumbing sections.
There we go. And we're looking pretty good. So let’s go ahead and PDF this guy.
So what I'm going to go ahead and do is go up to File. I'm going to go to Export and I'm going to use the built-in PDF printer. I go to PDF—creates PDF files.
There we go. I'm going to go ahead, Export Setup: 30 × 42, which we set up in the previous class. We want to go ahead—selected views and sheets.
We're going to create a new set. We want to go ahead and do that because we don't have one here. So I'm going to edit.
We're going to create a new one. So I'm going to go to my new empty set. We’re going to name this Final.
Now we want to change this display filter. We don’t want to see everything. We're going to go ahead and uncheck everything but sheets. We’ll have all sheets there.
And what I can do is now select the sheets. Boom. There we go.
And then if you wanted to, you could edit the print order. How we have it currently set up works fine. This is all listing alphanumerically because of how we ordered our sheets.
But if I edit the print order, you could move these orders around if you wanted it to work better by the browser organization. So everything there is good. I'm going to go ahead and hit Select and wait.
Yes—to save it. There we go.
Let’s go ahead—BIM 322. I'm going to go ahead and put my initials in here.
–Final. So you specify the file name and where you want to save it. I'm going to go ahead and hit Browse, go.
It might take you to your Documents folder. Let's go to our VDCI folder—BIM 322.
And we’ll just go ahead and save it here. Hit Open. There we go.
And then page sizes are 30 × 42. We want to zoom to 100% of the size. You never want to do fit to page.
Always zoom to 100% of the size. Automatic portrait is fine. Raster quality: high. Colors: color, etc.
Everything else is good. Let’s go ahead and make sure that Hide on Ref/Non-Ref View Tags is checked. And I think everything else is good.
Let’s go ahead, hit Export, and we’re going to let it do its thing. It’s going to take a minute. It’s exporting a lot of information.
It’s exporting a lot of sheets. I’ve seen some large jobs take a long time to print. That’s one thing to consider when setting up your time to print and plan your workflow.
So let me go ahead. I’m going to bring this up. I'm going to go over to my Documents, my VDCI, my BIM 321_322_downloads.
Let’s go ahead and launch this, and I’ll drag it onto the screen here and we can take a peek. Look at that. That looks really nice.
We have our nice 3D image here, and as you scroll down you can see our different views—it’s all looking pretty good. Great. So go ahead, get this uploaded into the final in the Learning Management System.
And I hope you’ve learned a lot during this class. It’s been a pleasure to teach you. I’ve enjoyed the time we spent together, and I hope to see you in another one.
Have a great time.