National BIM Standard Released for Review

clipped from www.facilityinformationcouncil.org National BIM Standard The National BIM Standard (NBIMS) Version 1, Part 1 Overview Principles and Methodologies is available for a two month industry review until May 21, 2007. For more details about this event please consult the press release. The NBIMS document is available for your review below. It is in two parts, the body of the document and the appendices and references. There are also several associated documents that are hyperlinked into the PDF. This comprehensive document has been in the works for over a year and is the collaboration of over thirty subject mater experts from many areas of the capital facility industry. There are still many issues to discuss, coordinate and resolve not only throughout the United States but also with our international counterparts. It is hoped that this effort will help with that discussion and to bring to closure any areas of confusion.

NavisWorks Contact

Does anyone out there have a good inside contact at NavisWorks? I've been trying and trying to get a working demo version to try out on our projects and I'm having absolutely no success. I initially tried to contact them directly, received no response. So I then contacted a local reseller, they sent me a demo version but when I try to activate the software it says I've already activated it. They don't know what to do so they forwarded the request to NavisWorks....guess what? No response!

Follow up to this....
The president of NavisWorks happened to see this and just called me directly and said I will have a working version in the morning. Thank you! Looking forward to working with you.

Importing ABS files into Revit

Unfortunately Revit will not import ACIS objects from ABS, you have to convert them to solids first.

In previous versions of ABS it was as simple as going to a isometric and exporting to ACAD, everything converted to ACAD faces perfectly, well now in ABS07 it's not so simple, with all the new options in display configurations you must have some things setup first.

If there is any piping in the project it will probably be displayed in 1-Line but we want 3D!

First go to a 3d view

Now go to display manager






Right click on configurations and click new













Now right click on the new configuration created and click set to current viewport








Click ok to leave the Display Manager.

Now go to style manager





Now set all the pipe size definitions so nothing is set to 1-Line














Click ok to leave the Style manager.

Now type in ConvertTo3DSolids at the command line.
Select all of the objects, select yes for erase selected objects. This will convert all of the ACIS objects into ACAD solids.

Now export to ACAD (version doesn't matter)

You will probably need to delete the 2d information the mechanical engineer has in the file or it will show in Revit.

After that import the resulting file into Revit.

The best method I have found is to create a new project and import the dwg into an in-place family. The family category needs to be set to Generic Model, if you do not set it to this the geometry will not show cut in sections.

Now just link in the rvt file to your main project, I also like to import the file to a workset that is not visible by default in all views, the ABS file really slows down revit so you only want to turn it on when you really want to see it.

What a pain! If anyone knows of an easier way please let me know. For now we will continue this so we can see the HVAC in our drawings, in the future we will probably just be using NavisWorks for collision detection.