Knowing how to group, filter and sort clash results in Navisworks, as well as letting clients view them in Navisworks Freedom/Simulate, can bring substantial value to your BIM projects. This article will guide you through the steps.
First things first though. If you are new to Navisworks and do not know yet how to configure it, do have a look at our Navisworks clash detective deep dive. If you are already familiar with the settings, you may still want to remove false-positive clashes before attempting to group them.
Once you have used rules to remove false positives and are in a position to focus on the remaining clashes, you may still have hundreds of results to sort through, either individually or in coordination meetings. Using the grouping, filtering and sorting features you will be able to easily examine clashes in a certain area, group similar issues together, and filter out those items that are not relevant to the meeting in hand.
Grouping clashes in Navisworks
Using the grouping options you can collect issues together that affect specific contractors, specific types of issues, related issues or just to help order the work you will be doing.
Grouping will count a group of clashes as a single issue, so you may want to select a beam, right-click and ‘group clashes involving item’. This will then allow you to deal with all clashes involving that beam as a single issue whilst you consider whether to move the beam or the objects clashing with it.
You can then select the group header to see all clashes in that group. By using the display settings ‘transparent dimming’ and ‘auto-reveal’ you can see where these are in relation to each other and work out the best course of action.
‘Grouping items by grid intersection’ or ‘by level’ can be an easy way to split up work between team members. And using filtering and sorting you can quickly bring together similar types of issues and group these for further investigation. Let us explore how to perform these useful actions.
Filtering clashes to see what’s relevant
Filtering is a great way to refine your results. It works much the same way as you use filtering tools in a search engine to get from 1,000,000 results for videos to the 20 relevant ones from last week.
For example, if you have created ‘search sets’ for different duct sizes, you can reduce the number of visible results between the mechanical services and steelwork by selecting a duct size then using the ‘filter by selection’ button. The filter by selection option can also be used to look at clashes involving a single pipe or beam.
By right-clicking in the results panel you can also ‘quick filter’ the results. This will allow you to see who a clash is assigned to or its current status. You can also filter objects by their level.
Sorting Navisworks clashes
Sorting is another powerful tool within Navisworks clash detective. You can sort the columns in the ‘results’ tab to gain clearer visibility. For example, you can prioritise rework by sorting the ‘distance’ column. Thus, you can work out which issues will need the most movement of an object. Or you may use it to look through the list of who is assigned to each clash.
Using the sorting tool in combination with filtering and grouping can quickly narrow down the most critical issues.
Viewing clash test results in Navisworks Freedom/Simulate
The following steps can be used to assist clients who need to review clash test results directly within Navisworks Freedom/Simulate (who do not have access to Navisworks Manage). If you want to know more about the different versions of Navisworks, have a look at our Navisworks post.
Exporting viewpoints from Navisworks Manage
After running a clash test in Navisworks Manage, the clash detective allows you to save the results as ‘viewpoints’. When you do this, the clash highlighting will be preserved as it was in the ‘results’ window. This action creates a folder in the ‘saved viewpoints’ window with the same name as the clash test. Each clash is saved as a viewpoint within the folder.
When a clash viewpoint is selected, the view of the clash is displayed exactly as it was shown in the clash detective. It is important to highlight that it also includes any mark-up that may have been added. All of the clash properties from the report are included in the comment associated with the clash. These can be viewed in the ‘comments’ window.
Viewing the published model in Navisworks Freedom/Simulate
By publishing the model to an NWD file, Navisworks users can use Navisworks Freedom/Simulate to view the results. When opened with any version of Navisworks, the clash test viewpoints are displayed when they are selected.
If the NWD file is opened in Navisworks Simulate, the ‘SwitchBack’ function (available with a right-click on an item) may be used to locate the clashing items directly within the authoring BIM application, such as Revit.
To summarise, the workflow is as follows:
- Run Navisworks Manage to run a clash test
- Report clash results as Viewpoints
- Publish the model to an NWD file
- Open the NWD file with Navisworks Freedom/Simulate
- Select the clash viewpoints in turn
- If using Navisworks Simulate, use ‘SwitchBack’ to locate the clashing items in Revit.
Did you find these tools useful? Do you have any other tips to classify and clean up clashes in Navisworks? Let us know in the comments below!
