by Geoff Woodhead
I recently had the need to combine files from a number of source applications to get an overall sense of a project and Navisworks is the best tool at our disposal to accomplish this.
I’ve used Navisworks a fair amount over the years and adding a file to a project has always been a pretty trivial task and as far as I could remember always just ‘worked’. I’m sure you can imagine my dismay when I was presented with this:
Had I really forgotten how to add files to Navisworks?! Surely not! First thing I did was check the size of the Navisworks Cache file, 3kb, hmm, I had expected a good deal more than that. Clearly something wasn’t being read properly, I had a poke around at the file reader settings, swapped the versions around a bit to see if it was just something to do with the 2015 version. No luck! I fired up Navisworks 2014, deleted the 3kb cache file and loaded the file up, this one worked! So what was different? I don’t remember configuring the 2014 version any differently to the 2015 one and it was only a couple of months ago that I installed both.
There was something familiar about those bounding boxes that I initially overlooked. I had been plagued with them for months previously when team members were opening Civil 3D files in plain AutoCAD, we finally combatted them by installing the Civil 3D Object Enabler on all machines that had AutoCAD installed on them. I initially overlooked this as I didn’t remember installing the 2014 version, perhaps it came in the box or maybe I’m a sleep installer. Having installed the 2015 Civil 3D Object Enabler I am now provided with this when adding files to Navis:
Much better! For anyone else experiencing bounding boxes whilst adding AutoCAD Civil 3D drawings to Navisworks, any AutoCAD based product, Autodesk 3DS Max & Max Design, InfraWorks, Impression, SSA or DWG TrueView I recommend installing the AutoCAD Civil 3D Object Enabler which can be downloaded here: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-civil-3d/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autocad-civil-2015-object-enabler.html
One happy chappy signing off.