By Jennifer MacMillan
ASCENT recently released the Autodesk® Navisworks® 2015 Essentials training guide. A number of changes were made to the training guide for 2015. These included both reorganization of existing content and the addition of new content. For those of you that frequently teach this class and are getting ready to switch to the 2015 version, I wanted to share a summary of the changes. Hope this helps!
Important Note: This training guide was written using Service Pack 2.
Chapter 1: This chapter didn’t involve any new content. However, I did make a number of changes to the content organization. In the 2013 version of the training guide, the exercises followed the topics, and I have returned the training guide to this style. In this first chapter I reorganized some of the topics into one so that each could be associated with an applicable exercise.
Chapter 2: This 3D Model Review chapter contains many different stand-alone topics. Each topic now has the associated exercise following the topic. In terms of content changes, the only change was to the Measurement and Moving Objects lesson in which I added content about Locking.
Chapters 3 to 5: The Timeliner, Animator, and Scripter material in these three chapters was reorganized to have the exercises follow the topics, where applicable. The overall content and functionality in these chapters remains unchanged in 2015 and did not require any topic changes.
Chapter 6: The Quantification chapter is where the majority of changes have been made to this training guide. There is a considerable amount of new content that covers 2D Quantification and an exercise has been added to teach this topic. The new 3D Quantification functionality that was incorporated has also been added to the chapter. Similar to all other chapters, the single exercise that was provided in 2014 has been divided into multiple smaller exercises that can be done following a Lesson.
Chapter 7: Clash detective does not have any new functionality in 2015. However, the exercises have been placed after each appropriate Lesson. Additionally, in the Exporting and Importing Clash Test exercise, content was added to enable the students to create a custom clash test.
Chapter 8: Autodesk Rendering is now the only available rendering environment. Presenter has been removed in 2015 (therefore Appendices A and B have been removed). The single exercise that was provided in 2014 has been divided into multiple exercises and the tasks have been moved after each applicable Lesson. Additionally, the content in the Photorealistic Rendering Lesson now includes information on how to render in the cloud.
Appendix A: As previously mentioned, the Presenter appendices that were available in 2014 have been removed from the training guide because this functionality is no longer available in the 2015 software. The Data Tools information is now included as Appendix A and its exercise was added again.
In all of the chapters of this training guide, Interface changes that affected the use of the software were also updated. Additionally, clarifications and corrections have been made where necessary.
Instructor Tools: All of the PowerPoint slides that are available as part of the Instructor Tools for this training guide have also been updated to reflect all of the changes in the training guide. Additionally, slides have been included in the presentation where students would complete an exercise.
I hope that you are pleased to see the exercises associated with each Lesson again. Thanks to all of you that commented and asked for this to be done. Your comments help to improve the training guide.
Jennifer
