Webinar Q&A: Managing design changes and creating automated Change Reports in Konstru.

Last Thursday, we did a simple demonstration of Konstru with Excel and Revit for the LIVE webinar called, “Managing design changes and creating automated Change Reports in Konstru.”  Thanks to everyone who attended and thank you for asking all the tough questions! The full recording of the Webinar is below, followed by the text of the Q&A from after the demo.

Webinar: Managing design changes and creating automated Change Reports in Konstru.

Webinar Q&A – August 24:

Following are the questions and answers from the webinar. Thank you again to everyone who participated and asked such great questions!

Q: In the Filter Settings dialog – what are single letter bubbles to right hand side?

A: It is a preview of what is filtered out. M=Material, G=Geometry, P=Profile Section, and so on.

Q: Can you “revert” forwards to a more current model?

A: Yes you can. No change is ever lost. So you can revert to a previous version of a model, and then still revert to a new version of the model later on.

Q: Let’s say that I have many concrete beams, and I change a custom shared parameter in Revit inside of that beam, eg rebar. Would konstru report the change?

A: yes, Konstru detects all of the changes on every element. You can then use the change view in the web UI to decide whether or not you want these changes to be visualized.

And if you would rather not upload or download certain changes, you can use the Konstru filter settings that are specific to each platform to exclude certain properties from being shared, such as attributes of name “My Revit Only Attr”)

Q: Is it a good idea to use the change report for Addendums when compared to the latest issuance?

A: Absolutely. This is one of the use cases that we had in mind when developing it. It can be difficult to remember, and list, every change that was made since the last issuance of a BIM model. Konstru can do this automatically, simply by comparing the state of the model from the last issuance with the state of the current one.

Q: We’ve had some issues with duplication of elements after changing for example, vertical elevation. We assumed that unique ID’s would prevent this. Do you have any suggestions to help prevent this?

A: Yes, we suggest that you do not create multiple models (in revit) from the same Konstru model, but rather use the Revit Central model to coordinate multiple instances of the same model. Otherwise, you can also choose to compare models by Geometry, rather than by ID, in which case it’s ok if they do not share the same ID.

Q: if a model is created in revit 2017 (example), can we use Konstru to revert the model to an earlier version of Revit?

A: Yes, you can go back from a Revit file created in either Rvt2018 or Rvt2017 down to Rvt2017 or Rvt2016. This is a feature that is not supported by Revit itself.

Q: Can I search in the history of my model between a range of dates?

A: There is currently no filter for dates. Great idea for a future feature!

Q: What would the process be for de-coupling say, elevation only. Slabs, beams in ETABS and revit are modeled differently to reflect the different assumptions for BIM vs analysis. Could you show how you would create a filter which de-couples z- justification. You could move a beam in plan, but you would not sync the elevation differences.

A: At the moment, it is not possible to decouple the Z-coordinate of an element. We only provide the option to translate the geometry of an element when making updates, or not to translate the geometry at all. I suppose you would have to rely on the Konstru plugins for Grasshopper or Excel for the time being, but we will add this functionality in the future to our filter settings.Thank you for the suggestion!