PublisherLT: Create an Associative Navisworks Model

This week I have decided to create three posts all of which are focused on leveraging the EnterprisePlatform PublisherLT product. The first Tip & Trick will demonstrate how anyone in your company can create an associated Navisworks model from your ShipConstructor project. Yes, you heard me correctly. Anyone in your company is able to create an automatically updating Navisworks model without any knowledge of ShipConstructor. You also do not have to worry about them modifying the ShipConstructor model. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that it will take them about 1 minute of effort.

How do I go about creating this Navisworks model?

I almost did not post this as a Tip & Trick as this functionality is built in with the default installation of PublisherLT 2015 R2. However, since there are some of you who did not know this I thought it was worthy to include as one of my Tips & Tricks.

Workflow

The workflow is very simple and as mentioned above, anyone in your company, even those with only basic technical knowledge, should be follow these steps in less than a minute.

Steps:

1. Run PublisherLT.
2. Connect to your ShipConstructor project.
3. Click “Change Output Directory” to specify where you want the Navisworks file to be generated.
4. Click on “Load Manager”.
5. Click on “Drawings”.
6. Click on “Select Specific”.
7. Select the drawings you want the Navisworks file to reference.
   1. Use the filters to aid in selecting your drawings.
   2. Click “OK”.
   3. With the Drawings tree item selected, click “Operations > Select”.
   4. Chose “NWF from DWGs”.
   5. Click “Ok”.
   6. Click “Run” .

Depending on the number of drawings you select, it can take < 1 min or up to 20 min for a large project.

You can also streamline the process by exporting and importing your criteria. Depending on how you select your criteria you can automatically get all drawings even if new drawings are added to your project.

Result

The final result is a Navisworks NWF model which references all the drawings you have selected. This can be the whole project or just a specific block/unit. Every time this NWF file is opened it will update the model to always reflect the latest version of the ShipConstructor project. One can also use the “Refresh” button within Navisworks to update it manually.

Demonstration Video

For those who do not have access to YouTube click here