Revit has a process by which you can track revisions to a project – create a Revision, cloud and tag it on a sheet… the process has been reviewed many times and that process is not the purpose of this blog post. What I’m working toward here is how IMAGINiT’s Clarity works with revisions in Revit. The background to this capability starts with a bit of client feedback in a presentation I was doing a while back – in that conversation, they asked if Clarity’s reporting tools could do anything with revisions. At the time, the answer was “no”, but it is something we were able to work into our 2013.1 release of Clarity.
If we step back and look at revisions in Revit, as was mentioned above, you have just a couple of things to work with – the dialog to enter and manage overall revisions, and placing revision clouds and tags. In the Revision dialog box, you can see all of the revisions that have been added, but you don’t have any insight as to where those revisions have impacted the model or sheets within the project. If you look at revision clouds and tags, they are considered annotations and cannot be scheduled in any way to show what sheets they have appeared on.
We set out to improve upon that in Clarity. (Duh. I mean, why else would I be writing something here if it wasn’t going to be something super spiffy-cool-neato-wow?)
In Clarity, we have a number of default reports that are automatically generated when you create a new Clarity project – and one of the new reports we create is appropriately called “Revision Info”.
After bringing a project into Clarity and running the dBExport task, this report will become populated with all sorts of good information. Initially it might all look a little bit unorganized but the question becomes, “How do you want to see this information?"
Not only do we have revision information for ALL Revit files that are a part of this project, but we can see revision numbers, descriptions, dates, sheets that the revision appears on, issued by and issued to information, and what model the revision came from. To see some of those fields later in the list, there is a button below the report called “Column Select” that will allow you to add or remove columns from the report as you see fit.
Once you have the columns in place, you can drag any of them to the list of columns or into the header area to start sorting by that field. Suddenly, we can see all revisions sorted by date, model name, revision number, or any combination of fields.
The key to remember with all of the information in even just this one report, is that all of the data is available from within a web browser to anyone with login permissions to that project. Approved project team members can easily and quickly see what sheets have been impacted by a revision – or potentially also identify which ones need to still be impacted by placing a revision – from here. No Revit skills required, just the ability to point and click… or on a tablet, point and tap.
Hopefully this was of interest to you – let us know in the comments below if you have any questions about Clarity or anything else that might be bugging you.
Have fun!
joe
