Uploading files and Desktop Connector, part 1 - BIM 360 Tutorial

- [Instructor] In chapter one, you learned what BIM 360 is. Now it's time to see what it can do. We'll begin with uploading files to BIM 360, so that you and your team can start working with them. Before we jump in, let's talk about the two folders that you see on the left side of your screen, the plans folder and the project files folder. BIM 360 is kind of separated into two areas: the plans folder, which is more for documents, and the project files folder, which is more for work in progress files that you work on as the project progresses. We'll talk more about these two areas, and how they behave differently as we get to future videos. So let's jump in and upload a file. I'm going to click the dropdown here next to upload files, and you'll see that there are actually two choices here, upload files and upload linked files. Upload linked files is for a case where maybe you have a Revit model that has other Revit models attached to it, and you want to upload all of them and maintain that relationship. In that case, you would use the upload linked files command. I just want to upload a single Revit file, so I'll click upload files. In my chapter two exercise files folder, I've got a file called 02_01_Madison.rvt, I'll select that and click open. You'll notice that I'm prompted to take the individual sheets in the Revit model and separate them out into individual documents in BIM 360. That's a function of the plans folder, and if I had uploaded this file to the project files folder, I wouldn't have seen that behavior. I'm going to cancel out of this upload, and we'll actually try uploading that Revit file to the project files folder. And I'll use a slightly different approach this time, I'll click the upload button in the center of the screen. I'll select that same RVT file, and you'll notice here that I'm not prompted to separate the Revit sheets into individual documents, just kind of uploading the file as it is into the project files area. So while that's processing, we can look at uploading a couple of other files. Let's go back to the plans folder, and this time I'll choose yet another method, I'll click the ellipsis, upload, and then files. So that's a third way we can launch an upload in BIM 360. Let's look now back to the plans folder and let's try uploading a PDF file. So for this example I'm going to use a third method. I'm going to bring up Windows Explorer, which is open to my chapter two exercise files folder, and I'm simply going to drag and drop a PDF file right into the plans folder. So once again, because I'm in the plans folder, it wants to separate my PDF out into individual documents for each sheet that it contains. So it's going to upload the file, it's going to process it for a little bit, and then I'll click continue. It's looking at how many sheets are there, and it wants to be able to not only separate out the individual sheets as individual documents, but also name and number them according to the title blocks contained in those documents. And you'll see in a moment how we can train BIM 360 to understand where that key information is located in the title block, so that we don't have to hand enter the sheet names and numbers into the system. Okay, so that's finished processing, and now I'm ready to teach BIM 360 how to read the name and number from each sheet. So you'll see here if I click the dropdown, there are some predefined templates that I've done earlier, and I want to point out that you can use those templates again and again on the same title block to save from having to do the steps that I'm about to show you. But I actually want to show you the definition process here, so I'll click define, and the first thing I'll do is crop the image to show where the important title block information is located, and then I'll click next, and within that area I want to define where is the sheet name and where is the sheet number. Now, this is going to become a template, so I'm going to name this LIL2, I've already got an LIL from before for LinkedIn Learning. And now I'll define where the sheet number is going to be located in my title block. I'll click that cell, click the crop tool, and then draw just inside the zone where the sheet number is going to be located. Then I'll do the same thing for the title of the sheet. Click the cell, and then click the cropping tool to show it exactly where that part of the title block is located. So now it's going to scan each title block on each sheet, look for the sheet name here and the sheet number here, and use optical character recognition to turn that into text and to name and number my sheets. I'll click save, and that's going to become another template that I can choose for a future processing of a PDF, and now it's going to go about the business of extracting, naming, and numbering each individual sheet in the PDF file. Okay, the extraction's complete, and 20 sheets have been extracted, and as I scroll down, I can actually review the numbers and names that have been applied, and make changes if I need to, but this all looks good. I'll click publish all, and now the publishing is all finished, I can close down this window, and see the individual sheets that have been separated out in the PDF. So, again, I uploaded a single PDF file, but it became multiple documents in the BIM 360 environment. And I can click in and view each one of these sheets as an individual document. And you can see there are tools here on the right side for reviewing and marking up, and there are all kinds of functions that I can do with each one of these documents that make BIM 360 such a powerful tool. We'll cover those in future videos.