- [Narrator] The first step in making the transition
from paper to digital is simply to ask for the PDF version
of the plans instead of the paper version.
Once you have that PDF file you have lots of options
for working with it.
So let's start with the basics.
Here I have that PDF file.
It's a single file.
It was sent to me by the designer
and this single file contains all of the sheets
for the project.
If I double click on it,
my Windows desktop environment is set to open up PDF files
in the internet browser and that's what it's done here.
So here's my set of drawings
and you'll see I've got just a real simple toolbar here
that would allow me to print, save or zoom in and out.
So I'm going to zoom out a little bit
and you'll see I can just use the scroll wheel
and scroll through my drawings
and look at all of the sheets in my set of drawings.
Here's my foundation plan.
I can zoom in and move around a little bit
to find information that I need on this set of drawings.
Now in this case, my set of tools
is limited to just about that, zooming in and out
and finding information.
So I need to be able to do more than that
with a set of digital drawings
if they're really going to replace paper drawings.
So let's look at how we can make some more things happen
with these digital drawings.
The first thing I want you to note though
is this set of drawings is 93 pages.
I'm on sheet five of 93.
And let's go ahead and close that out.
Go back to our desktop and I want to right click
on that PDF file and look at the properties
and you'll see that another issue I have here
is that that 93 page set of drawings
is about 30 megabytes and that could get much, much larger
depending on how these drawings were processed,
how the PDF file was created
and how many sheets are in it.
So if this was a set of plans that were 1,000 sheets
for a big commercial project,
this file size would be huge.
It would take a long time to open it
every time I wanted to look at just a single sheet.
I'd have to open up the entire project file.
And the other issue is that if I were out in the field
and I were trying to open this,
say extract it from the cloud and open it on my phone,
I'd be using up a lot of cellular data in order to transfer
just that single file that contained all my sheets, again,
even though I might just want to view one sheet.
I need a way to do that quickly and that's where
some of the specialty PDF software comes into play.
PDF software that was built for the construction industry.
Let's take a look.
I'm going to start by showing you a piece of software
called BIM 360 Docs.
Now the reason I'm starting with this one
is that BIM 360 Docs, you'll see here
is an Autodesk program, it's part of the Autodesk family
of software and that software includes
some of the software that designers use
to create our drawings in the first place.
So some of Autodesk programs include Revit,
that designers use
to create three dimensional building information models.
We'll look at one of those in just a minute
or AutoCAD that designers will use
to draw those two dimensional drawings
that we've already looked at.
So what that means here and the reason I'm tying
all this together is that it's quite possible
that if you ask a designer for digital drawings,
they could do one of two things.
They might do what we've already seen
and that is convert it into a single PDF file
and email it for you to take and process and use from there.
But, if they're already using this Autodesk family
of programs it's conceivable that instead,
they might just take their drawings
and dump them right here into BIM 360 Docs
and then share them with you.
In that case, you're going to need
to get a BIM 360 Docs account to look at them
and that's what I want to walk you through.
Now, a basic account is free forever,
free for a single project.
You can have unlimited users sharing and viewing
that same drawing.
There's no storage limits whether it's 93 sheets like ours
or a big commercial project with 1,000 sheets.
It's still under this free account, no credit card required.
Put your email address in, click get started,
and you're ready to go.
Now I've already got an account
so I'm going to switch over to the sign in screen.
And I'm going to go ahead and log in
using my email address and password.
And when I sign in, what you're going to see here
on the screen is the same thing that you would see
if you signed up for an account for the very first time.
It's going to open to the sample project
and that sample project comes
with four two dimensional drawings as well as
this RVT file which is a Revit file.
Now I want to take a look at that first.
So the Revit file is the three dimensional
building information model and because they've put it here
in BIM 360 Docs for me,
I can not only view my two dimensional plan drawings,
but I can also go ahead and click here
and without having Revit software
I can view the three dimensional Revit model.
Now this is kind of a cool feature,
because I can use my mouse and I can scroll around
and sort of manipulate this model.
I can zoom in to the front door.
And I can do things like use first person view
to double click on the inside of the building
which now puts me inside the building
where I can continue to walk through
and really get a three dimensional sense
of what this project looks like in addition
to looking at my two dimensional drawings.
Now in BIM 360 Docs I have some tools
that allow me to work with these drawings
whether they're two dimensional or three dimensional,
the tools are generally the same.
I have measuring tools.
And when I click on that, you'll see
that I can use the cursor to very quickly do things
like measure the width of this hallway at 21.9 feet.
So again, just like I could do on paper drawings
with a physical scale, I can measure things
on these digital drawings.
I also have the ability to do things like add markups.
So I can add an arrow, I can add some text.
And go through and markup all of my drawings.
Again, whether they're the two dimensional versions
or this three dimensional version.
Now another feature
is that I can keep these markups private.
So if I have multiple people viewing this same set
of drawings I can choose for these markups
to be only for me, keep them private
or I can click here and I can publish them.
Now, everybody that shares
these drawings sees these markups.
So let's click on done and close the three dimensional model
and get back to our two dimensional drawings.
Now you'll see here in this list view
that all of my sheets are now individual files
so instead of having a single file
with all those 93 sheets of drawings like our sample set had
I now have individual files and I can click
on the thumbnail view here and now I'm just looking
at thumbnails without having to open up the entire set.
I can click on one of those thumbnails
and I'm just opening up a single page
instead of that entire set of drawings.
Again, really, really useful and really important
to the functionality of digital drawing software
particularly when we're working with
these large format drawings
that we've used in the construction industry.
So now I've got my floor plan open.
Let's go ahead and zoom in.
You'll notice while I'm doing that,
that I still have the same markup and measuring tool bar
on the bottom and I want to just show you one more feature.
You'll notice here that there's some bluish colored boxes
around some of our cross sections
and some of our details.
Now this is really cool because what these are
are hyperlinks and the software added
these hyperlinks automatically.
So if this were a paper set of drawings,
I would understand that this call out here
is referring me to sheet A5-1 to look at detail 13.
So I can find the details of this little corner here.
And in a paper set of drawings I would flip
to sheet A5-1.
In a digital set of drawings,
because these hyperlinks have been added
I can just click on the hyperlink.
I can get a thumbnail view and I can click on
that thumbnail view and open that detail page.
Zoom in and find the detail
that shows me that corner, detail nine.
When I'm done viewing that I just click on return
and I'm right back to my floor plan.
So these start to get really easy to use,
they don't use a lot of data,
because I'm just opening one sheet at a time
and ignoring all the rest of the sheets in the set.