Navisworks 2019 Teach an old Navisworks new BIM 360 tricks

By Justin Doughty

After being asked about some Navisworks workflows by a customer, I was testing a few ideas and found Navisworks has some new “tricks” thanks to some of its core features that play nicely with BIM 360.

I found that by using Navisworks you can automatically create NWC/NWD files directly in the BIM 360 Project.

There are a few limitations to this, and the BIM-360-Docs-Desktop-Connector is currently in preview. But to test this, you will need:

A BIM 360 Login

Permissions to edit the project/folder

BIM-360-Docs-Desktop-Connector

The first step is to either open the file in Navisworks or drag and drop from Windows explorer. This is using the path from the Desktop Connector to point to your BIM 360 Project:

You can see once the File is in Navisworks, as usual an nwc is created in the folder:

But we can also see that this appears in Document Management:

This could be useful for quickly generating and sharing nwc files with other project members.

Taking this one step further, we can use the Batch Utility from Navisworks in the same way:

This allows us to create a batch of multiple nwd files and also specify a folder to put them in, all through the BIM 360 path:

This results in the files appearing directly in the chosen folder in Document Management keeping things a lot tidier: