Today I was giving a team a demonstration of some of the tools of BIM 360. We generally have been under utilizing the tools and I'm trying to get more engagement with them aside from cloud hosting and syncing. I got a question that I figured would be easy to answer, yet, it wasn't... How does a team member indicate they are done....
At my last firm, I had recently done a presentation for Design Review, and was asked the same question. It's process was a bit different as it did have statuses and even showed up in the Revit model when linked, but there was no good way to indicate a markup was done visually in that.
So I tried doing more research and come to find out that Autodesk intends for the person who made the markups to have a new set published (in both markups tools) and then mark them finished as he reviews them. This certainly seems like an ideal situation and is probably great for a major QA session or periodic checks. However the designers will usually highlight markups that are done. This helps indicate what's done while they are working, and which ones are complete when the reviewer goes back to double check. In neither option is there a way for users to visually indicate they finished said markups. In these more integrated solutions the alternative could simply be clicking on a markup and a popup set of options comes up you can click. Doing this will change it's appearance and make it easier for the editor to see what's done, and for the reviewer to check what is done. Even if they don't have time, it's still indicated as done in the markups and could even be filtered off for the editors after publishing a new model. Reviewers need an option for the markup to be "approved" which will archive the markup.
In general, Design Review and Docs need to be the same and have the same functionality with the exception of one being cloud based and one being network based. The process should have all these features, but especially the first one.
- A way to change the status of a markup quickly, preferably clicking on it and clicking complete, or needs clarification. Completing it will mark it visually and indicate to the author it's complete and needs review. Needs clarification will indicate to the author further action on their end is needed. When an author approves a completed markup, it's hidden and archived.
- BIM 360 should have an interactive version of the markups inside Revit like Design Review does, except incorporating the above features and being less cumbersome to manage.
- The ability to assign a markup
- grouped markups in design review and ACC docs like BIM 360 does
- Ability to leave comments on markups and keep track of it in BIM 360/ACC
- More tools for marking up such as pasting in images from clipboard, maybe even symbols and some drawing tools for walls, doors, and other typical items.
- dumb dimensions
- smarter dimension (why do i need to set the scale of the drawing to draw a dimension when the software should know the dimensions based off the sheet and metadata.
In both cases I presented this tool, I realized as cool as it is, it's got to account for average use case and the most important being the marking off/status. In addition how is it that there still isn't a review layer in Revit that shows these when there were DWF's that could do this? Also being able to paste in images from the clipboard is used all the time. These should be able to be added into a markup group.
Most designers will agree there is definitely room for improvement in regular PDF markups, but ease of use and use cases needs to be accounted for.
