Ability to detach DWG from NWC

[jspartz]

I don't work on the DWGs myself, so I don't need them linked. All I need is the NWC. When you create a NWC off of a DWG file and then bring the NWC into Navisworks it finds the DWG location and loads the drawing (recreating the NWC every time). What I do is create the NWC then zip the DWG so Navisworks can't find it. I hate when it tries to be smart and load DWGs instead. I would like the ability to shut off it's search for the DWG and just use the NWC I appended.

Say I didn't hide the DWGs, and it loads the DWGs instead, now it depends on the computer and whether it has the correct object enablers to whether it is going to look correct and mess up all your clashes. With the NWC it was exported out of AutoCAD on a computer with the correct object enabler already. There are many reason I don't want it to point back to the DWG, but this is just a few.

[JeffHUK]

Hi Jamie,

I think there may be a misunderstanding here over what each NWC file is doing.

An NWC file exported from AutoCAD is an export usable directly in its own right. It should not do any loading of DWG files or equivalent when you load it into Navisworks. Please highlight this as an issue with Support if that is occurring.

An NWC file made during loading a DWG file into Navisworks is a cache file. It is deliberately set up to refer to the DWG because its sole purpose is to speed loading of the DWG if the DWG is unchanged (no actual conversion is required if so). As a general rule it should not be referred to except by Navisworks itself.

If you wish to refer to a given CAD file in an unchanging manner, use the NWD format. This is a file format intended for snapshot usage, and will not auto-update at any point.

Our usual suggested workflow (somewhat simplified) would be that you have an NWF referring to your CAD files (either NWC exports or directly referred in Navisworks) and publish/save that as an NWD snapshot when you wish to operate on or store an unchanging dataset.

I hope that helps,

Jeff

[jspartz]

Well, then it doesn't work the way it's intended. I create NWCs using NWCOUT in AutoCAD, load the NWC in and if I did not hide or move the DWG it will point to that. In fact, it won't even have the NWC name, it will list the DWG name when I append the NWC. Save the NWF file, close it, hide the DWG, and reopen the NWF and it will ask where the DWG is. It's done this from 2009-2011 on 5 different computers with different setups. I brought it up to support in version 2009 or 2010 and they said that's just the way it works and didn't understand why I wouldn't want it to look at the DWG.

[JeffHUK]

Hi Jamie,

I've just double-checked this - ironically what I posted was correct for every file type except DWG. Apologies for the confusion. DWG currently has a special case that is doing this automatic refresh when you load an NWC that was an export.

As a general rule we don't do this because export & import can yield different results (for example DGN export has always yielded better fidelity for some DGN solids).

I can make no guarantees but I would anticipate that this behaviour will be changing for DWGs to match in the future.

Hope that helps,

Jeff

[cjehly]

I haven't tested this in a bit, but if you load the NWC file from a different directory than the actual DWG file, you USED to be able to keep them separated.