What's new in Bimsync?

As of the beginning of the year 2022, the Catenda team has released new features and updated old ones in Bimsync (open CDE). Since last year, the technical team has launched a new internal feature called "User Voice". Through direct conversations with our customers, users and resellers, we take note and promote to our product team improvements and new features that would enhance the day-to-day operations in their Bimsync experience.

Discover the 5 new features/updates in Bimsync. 

1. Document Approval

This new feature provides the ability to create a Document Approval workflow, related to the "Common Data Envrionement" (CDE).

The picture below describes the steps necessary to have the process in place on your project.

1. Activate the Status workflow in your Document library settings
2. Edit the available statuses to your need
3. You can now upload Documents as Drafts
4. When the project contains Drafts, you can select them and create a new Approval
5. One important step is to adjust the Approval settings (see video below)
6. An Approval request nominates a Publisher (person in charge of making the final decision over the publication), and one or several Reviewers, in charge of validating (or not), the set of drafts
7. Each reviewer will decide whether the draft is Approved, Approved with comment, or Rejected
8. At the end of the review, the Publisher will choose the outcome of the approval, by picking the documents to be published.
9. From the approval settings, Issues related to the documents may be created in order to keep track of the process later on

A detailed demonstration of those steps are shown in this tutorial:

2. Preview IFC files in the Document section.

Uploading an IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) inside the Document section enables a preview of the model individually. Furthermore, users can send this model to the 3D viewer by clicking on the 3D button.

3. Drag and drop

The "drag and drop" feature in Bimsync allows users to drop files, folders and ZIP. 

4. 3d measurements

There are some improvements that has been made to the measurement tools in Bimsync. Recently support for imperial measurement have been added, in addition to the existing metric ones. The default can be defined in project settings.

The measures snaps to curves/lines created by a clipping plane are now supported. They also support snapping to the centre of circular objects like pipes. This works for both the measurement tape and the laser measure tool. Snapping also works with point clouds.

Notice the "bullseye" in the measurement pointer. If it is blue, it is not snapping. If it is red, it snaps to a line/curve. If it is green, it snaps to a corner.

The point measure is a new tool in the measure toolbox. With this tool users can get the x, y and z position of the part you are pointing at in 3D. It is supported both for Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and point clouds. This tool also supports snapping.

Learn more about point cloud here and here.  

All of these tools can be accessed by clicking on the arrow icon in the top right corner of the 3D viewer.

5. Public bookmark

Project's administrator can decide to share a public link to a bookmark with a set of revisions and models.

Learn more about all the updates in Bimsync here. 

Eva Stepak-Heritier, Digital Brand & Content Marketing Manager at Catenda.