Working with external consultants across Bluebeam Revu and Archicad: markups, issues and Studio

Many practices work in Archicad while their consultants, installers or clients review the documentation outside a BIM environment. This session starts from that scenario and puts the PDF forward as the meeting point: Bluebeam Revu so that anyone can annotate and respond on the drawings, and Archicad to collect those annotations as project issues. The first part explains what Revu is and what a PDF allows you to do beyond reading it. It goes through the interface, the choice of working profile and the markup tools: text boxes, highlighting, revision clouds and freehand shapes for sketch-type annotations. From there it moves on to what gives each markup its value, its metadata: author, date, subject, drawing and comment. The markups list works like a spreadsheet; you can reply to each annotation, change its status and add your own columns, for example a responsible party, so as to filter afterwards by what concerns each discipline. It also shows how to standardise the graphic appearance of the markups and save them in the Tool Chest for reuse, and how to generate exportable markup reports, including the option of appending them to the PDF itself with hyperlinks that lead to each point on the drawing. The measurement part is presented in an introductory way: calibrating the document, setting units, measuring lengths and areas on a vector PDF, and using visual search to count repeated elements. The central block is the connection with Archicad. The Bluebeam Connection add-on is installed and located, what to do when the palette does not appear is reviewed, layouts are published to PDF from Archicad, annotated in Revu as an external consultant would, and those annotations are imported into Archicad as issues, where they are managed with priority, status, assignment and comments. The comparison of two versions of the same drawing in order to locate the changes is also shown. The last part is given over to Studio. A distinction is drawn between projects, understood as a document repository with permissions, checkout and revision history, and sessions, framed as a meeting room where several people annotate on the same document. It explains the choice of server and its bearing on the jurisdiction of the data, inviting participants, activity reports and chat, and how to attach photos, videos or 360 images to a markup.