Bluebeam Revu 2020: optimise review, measurement and collaboration on your projects

This recorded session works through Bluebeam Revu 2020 as a tool for working on PDF in architecture, engineering and construction projects. The presenter starts from a simple idea: most of the applications involved in a project are capable of producing PDF, so PDF can become the common format in which the design is reviewed, measurements are taken, changes are coordinated and a record is kept of what has been agreed. From there it is shown on screen, step by step, how Revu organises that work. The first part is devoted to the interface and to markups. It covers the panels, the menus, the customisable toolbar and the profiles, which make it possible to save a set of tools and pass it on to another discipline. Markups are then created on a drawing (clouds, text boxes, lines and arcs), their graphics are adjusted with colour, fill and transparency, and they are saved to the Tool Chest for reuse, which is the practical way to establish a graphic standard shared between teams. The core of the session is the markups list. Each markup carries information and metadata with it, and the list presents them in rows and columns, like a spreadsheet: author, date, subject, measurement, comments and whatever custom columns need to be added, for example an owner. From there you filter, sort, save the filters, accept or reply to a markup, and generate a report in PDF or Excel whose summary is hyperlinked to each markup on the drawing. Measurement is handled by the same mechanism: layers from the imported CAD, scale calibration, linear, perimeter, area and fill measurement, element counting by visually searching for a symbol, and classification by material. The last part deals with document management and collaboration. Two revisions of the same drawing are compared with document comparison, which flags the differences detected and records them as traceable markups; sets of drawings are worked with and hyperlinks are generated between the index, the sections and the details. The session is closed by the two communication workflows: the bridge between Revu and BIM, with a round trip between Archicad and Revu in which the collaborator's markups return to the model and are managed as issues, and Studio, with Projects as a cloud repository with file locking and revision history and Sessions for live review.