Bluebeam Revu and Archicad: Collaborate with People Outside BIM

The fourth session in the Archicad 23 launch seminar series, devoted to the connection between Archicad and Bluebeam Revu. The subject is how to keep everyone who takes part in the project without using BIM applications — site manager, installers, consultants, procurement — inside the working process, without losing traceability of the communication. The route follows six phases: preparing the documentation, exporting it, importing it into Revu, using it, marking it up and reporting the issues back to the design team. It starts from a model of an office building with architecture, structure, building services and interior design, shows how the drawings are prepared and coded in Archicad and how a publisher set exports the project's 14 drawings to a single PDF, both from the Archicad navigator and from the Revu connection add-on. It also saves a building services detail in U3D format so that it can later be embedded as a 3D PDF. In Revu, that 14-page PDF is opened and the session goes through what the documentation makes possible without opening the model: CAD-style navigation, insertion of the 3D detail inside the PDF with changes of display and hiding of parts, page numbering derived from the drawing codes defined in Archicad, hyperlinks between section markers and the index, use of the layers inherited from the original file, and calibration of the drawing to measure lengths and areas, including the paint bucket tool for irregular spaces. The core of the session is markup. Each annotation stops being a drawing on top of the sheet and becomes a row in a list with author, date, comment and status, along with any additional fields the team decides on, attached images, filters by department and exportable reports that link back to the exact point on the drawing. On that basis the collaborative sessions are shown, with several participants annotating the same document at once and a review carried out from a tablet appearing in real time on the office screen. It closes with the comparison of two versions of the same batch of drawings to locate the changes, and with the return to Archicad: the PDF markups are imported from the connection palette, Archicad identifies the target drawing and adds them to a markup entry created for the review and to the chosen layer, with the option of skipping duplicates on subsequent rounds. Each markup remains in the Markup tool with its author, its time and its comment thread. Session recorded in July 2019.