On Thursday of last week I attended the Kelar Pacific 2012 Product Launch Event. This event was great and very informative showing what the Autodesk 2012 products have to offer. One of the things that made it great was that it felt like it was a one on one session with the presenter and me. It was very interactive which allowed for a more free flow of info.
Derek Renn presented what's new in a few different platforms and started with AutoCAD 2012. He pointed out an interesting use for the new Content Browser in that it could potentially be used to index a master standards file and allow you to easily populate a working file with content from the standard. Since it will index all objects inside and outside of a dwg file, the search potential is huge! I made a note to double check on my deployment image to see if we can configure in advance the folders to watch for indexing and to enable indexing for both private/public locations which allows searching across the drives on the server.
Derek next presented what's new in Revit Architecture 2012. He started off with Part & Assemblies and made a few points on applying these features to Architectural workflows. One way was to break floors into parts using grid lines which would ease in creation of the floors. Also, walls can be broken into parts for interacting with structural model or for QTO purposes. Even more exciting is now that we can break elements into parts, we can 4D sequence elements in Navisworks much more easily now. Lots to explore and play with there. One last thing he pointed out is that you can now apply view templates to 3d graphic display options. Yeah!
Lastly, Behzad covered Navisworks Manage 2012 in depth on its new features after wrapping up Revit Structure 2012. One feature I really appreciated is the ability to "Group" clashes. Say you have a steel beam with multiple ductwork cutting through it. In past versions, you would have to deal with multiple items, now you can place them in one group (think: folder) and find every related issue. Of note was the ability to use Switchback with Revit now. YES! Also, you can now assign people to clashes and have this show in the report to help with tracking who's fixing what. Then, when exporting be sure to choose HTML Tabular as this will make a clean export (instead of creating and export folder to place everything in), as well as allow you to open it in Excel. Lastly, Navisworks can now open 2d/3d DWF files. If its a 3d DWF, it should allow clash detection with other model objects.
I didn't stay for the whole event as I got what I needed out of the sessions I mentioned above. They were ready to present Revit MEP, AutoCAD MEP and Civil 3D whats new as well, but not sure if they were covered or not. Kelar provided a great lunch, nice informal atmosphere and some great insights to the 2012 products from Autodesk. More goodies to stick in the hat and make use of here at work.
