An Introduction to Fabrication Data Manager

DAVE MANGHAM: Thanks very much for joining us on this session, which is an Introduction to Fabrication Data Manager or FDM, as it's known. And joining me in this session are Craig Farish and Louis Mdanat. So I'm just going to pass you on to Craig, who'll just go through the safe harbor statement before we carry on.

CRAIG FARISH: Thanks, Dave. So, yeah, safe harbor. So we want to make sure that everyone's fully aware of where we stand from our side. A lot of the content that we're going to be showing is going to be on development-based content. We're currently in the technical preview, which means things are constantly evolving. You might see things in here that may not make it into the final release, so don't make any purchasing decisions on anything that you see. Also, something might go wrong, so it might require us to quickly restart, get going again.

DAVE MANGHAM: Thanks very much for that, Craig. And just a little bit about myself, as you can see, I'm seasoned industry veteran. I've been in this industry for over three decades now, and predominantly focused on all the fabrication software suite that Autodesk provides to the industry, with the specialist experience in the sort of manufacturing side or ducting. And also, I've got my own duct solution that's available in the industry called MEP track.

And yeah, I've been also a Partner or a Director at the Global Fabrication at ENGWorks Global in Chicago. So that's a little bit about me. You can read it there. But yeah, I'll pass it back over to Craig now to introduce himself.

CRAIG FARISH: Thanks, Dave. Yeah, so I'm similar to Dave. I've got a couple of decades under my belt in the industry. I started out on the tools using both AutoCAD and the MEP products that was known as back then. I later joined MEP, which were the original developers of the fabrication software, that was in 2009, which were later acquired by Autodesk in 2011. Since then, I've worked from developing and building out the content and the configurations.

I moved into QA roles, done a little bit on the design side, and now a product owner. So I've basically got to take the requirements for the users, translate that into a language that the engineering teams understand, so we'd come out with solutions for the industry.

LOUIE MDANAT: So, hi, all. I'm Louie. I'm the Director of Fabrication Data at ENGWorks. I've been working with them for almost eight years now. I've been focusing on the fabrication solution in data, in workflows, for the BIM sector.

DAVE MANGHAM: OK, so in this session, we've got some learning objectives that we're going to touch on around the Fabrication Data Manager, moving from loading a configuration, local configuration, which has been consumed on a workstation desktop. And then, we are going to look into reviewing or demonstrate reviewing and modifying that content, and then creating new content, and deploying configurations. So it's a sort of a high level overview of fabrication data manager.

Well we've got some live demonstration to throw in during the session as well. And this is just a quick slide to show the relationship between the design aspect of the industry, the workflow, and the coordination and documentation and then and the detailing. And I just want to point out there are a number of different sessions that are happening during the AU conference. Their references are on there for these, which are all sort of related in one way or another to the topic that we're talking about.

So if you've got a chance and you want to jump into one of these other sessions and have a look, you'll see how things connect in the workflow of the whole industry. So yeah, OK, so what is FDM? We're going to call it FDM rather than saying Fabrication Data Manager all the time. But it's basically a new, as you can see, Cloud-based offering, which enables you to manage your configurations in the Cloud.

It's built on the Forge, the Forge platform, which is-- it facilitates intuitive and their visual management and collaboration for consumption in Revit. So it's a new tool which is certainly going to be beneficial for people in the industry who have to manage data associated with the fabrication workflow in Revit and currently, well, also existing desktop products.

CRAIG FARISH: So one of the questions we get asked commonly is, how does this all work? So it's quite simple. It's not quite as streamlined as what happens on the desktop side. Obviously, we've got a Cloud service involved in this. But ultimately, what happens is you take your local disk configuration, use the FDM sync app to push that data up into the Cloud. That goes into, as Dave said, the old Forge platform, which is now APS.

Once the data is in APS, we can use FDM to query and modify the data as we see fit. And then to consume those changes back into Revit, we also use FDM sync. So what is a configuration? Again, another great question. I see the configuration as an ecosystem of content, database settings, and that also extends onto manufacturing. So this whole piece is kind of a self-contained set of data, which means, ultimately, it's product agnostic to a point.

Initially, we were obviously supported on the MEP fabrication products. It took some effort to get that data into Revit. It started in 2016. We're still integrating and tweaking things now, and it's going to continue evolving. But there's no reason why we couldn't take the ecosystem and push that into another application, to have support for the MEP fabrication stuff. But where we are right now is supporting Revit only. We have an opportunity to push the data back into the fabrication products, but we don't see a need for it yet.

When we get into the sheet metal side, which is probably another year away, there may be an opportunity to do it there, or maybe there's other services that means we can do the same through Revit, so we don't need to push the data back. So which content? So for us, the way that the MEP fabrication software works is the content is template-based parametric geometry, and what that means is all of the patterns are predefined in the application.

So when you're defining content, you take a template that matches what it is that you want to create, so we get a body geometry. And then we develop connected geometry and attach that to the body via the settings on the parts to create the parts that would require for the modeling. These parts can be driven by table data, so they can be fully parametric. And these also consume data from the database, so we'll go through this in detail in the coming slides.

But all of this data is set up by the user and shared across all of the parts in the configuration. More detail on content can be seen in Alison's class. I'm calling that out here because we don't want to go into too much detail on the content side. Obviously, this is an introduction to FDM, so we want to leave that to Alison's class. So that's coming up next, if you want to see that.

So where do you begin? So it's not easy to get started. You have to jump through hoops to find the data. So the first place you're going to need to go is to the manage.Autodesk.com site. You can do a search for any of the fabrication products, so that's CAD, EST or CAM. And then you can click on the details or the View Details link at the bottom of the cards. And on the Library tab, you'll see the configurations that we shipped with the products.

So these are predefined for both the metric and the imperial units. So you pick which ones relevant to where you are, and that's a good starting point for creating content. You can also acquire from third parties or you can just build your own from scratch, which is a lot of work, so I wouldn't recommend it. So starting with a good solid foundation, starting point is definitely a recommendation from us. So to get the configuration into the Cloud, you're going to need FDM sync.

To find FDM sync, again, you need to be in manage.autodesk.com. And on the navigation panel on the left hand side, you need to click on the product updates link, and then search for sync, and then you'll find the long name of the FDM sync tool, download, install that. And then, to launch FDM, again, we don't make this easy. You can go to manage.autodesk.com and search for fabrication, and you'll find the MEP Fabrication Data Manager card.

And then, you can click on the Access link. That should take you to FDM, but actually it doesn't it takes you to the help. From the help, you can read all about what the technical preview is, what we're going to enable you to do, and all of the bits and pieces that are involved in configuring the data. Where you need to be to find the link for FDM is on the Getting Started side. And then, you hit the link on the top right hand corner of the page.

So Fabrication Data Manager. So like I said, this is currently a technical preview. This is probably going to be in technical preview until maybe summertime next year. But either way, the anatomy is fairly simple and it's aligned to most of the other Cloud products that you'll see from Autodesk. We have a Top Nav, and that's broken up into individual sections, so you can see a list of configurations. And that'll cover any configuration you upload, any configuration that another admin shares with you.

All will be contained within this list. You'll see notifications. So if you have multiple admins or contributors and they're making changes, you'll see in the notification bell and a badge listing how many changes you've got to see. The help, which will give you things like the about box and, obviously, a link to the help that you've just seen, and then your typical account settings. The Side Navigation, this is where it all happens. This is where all the data lives.

I've broken out the Admin section because I don't have admin access on the imperial piping config. I'm only a contributor. But there's invalid data, which we'll go into in more detail, and permissions. And then all of the data section, which is everything from the services, to the parts, to all of the individual components like materials, connectors, and the specs. And then external links, so provide feedback, which is really important for us. This is how we learn what's important for you and how we can change direction if we need to.

And then cookies, which I'm sure everyone's really excited about, so some fun reading. So invalid data, So this is an interesting area. And I say interesting because on the call side with all of the legacy applications, all of the responsibility for getting things right is on the user. So if you plug-in dimensions or data in there that doesn't make any sense or is just wrong, fabrication will let you do that. And the way you find out in fabrication is downstream when you're in modeling mode and something doesn't look right. Then you've got to find out and troubleshoot to find out what's wrong.

On the FDM side, we try to inform you up front where things go wrong. So putting things in place like validation and forms or tables is something that you'll see quite a lot of in FDM. What that means is we need to handle all of the current invalid data that's in the configurations that are getting uploaded. What we're doing right now is putting things into invalid data bucket. Moving forward, there might be better ways of doing this that we're looking into, but right now, this is what we have.

Not all of this data is editable. So it might live here for a while, or you can fix it on the core side and re-upload the data. But ultimately, that's what the invalid data section is. Permissions. This is an interim solution to the permissions. It gives you the ability to add people to your configuration, that you want to either work with you to make edits or just need to see the data, like maybe a product manager or a retailer downstream. Either way, you plug-in their email address from their Autodesk account. If it's a valid account, they will get access.

So we're getting into some of the data. Now there's common themes throughout FDM, so we don't want to go into too much detail on any one section just here. But ultimately, what's happening is, by the navigation panel, you'll see each type of data. And there's no real order that the data has to be configured to be valid. You can do it in pretty much any order. There are kind of pitfalls that you need to avoid. But generally, you just go through and set up the data, how you're comfortable doing that.

Right now, we're just going to pretty much go top to bottom and looking at some of the main pieces. So services is pretty much the data that you see in Revit. So when you hit the dropdown for your services in Revit, it's the names that you see. But behind the service is other pieces of information that's important, and this is more for the BIM managers to organize the data and configure it for downstream purposes. So the name is the first one. Obviously, that's what we see in Revit.

We have the ability to assign a category, and that's pretty much for all data. And like I said, that's organizational. The part template is the combination of parts that have been pulled together in an engineering standard to work together. The common one is kind of having a copper and steel, a copper and steel range with valves and other things involved. Those things are template driven, and we'll show you that next. The part specification is not really something that's important for piping.

You can create it for data completeness, but it's not really a dependency. And then you can get into installation settings, which is just customizing how the installation behaves when you're in the modeling environment. So looking side by side with what this looked like with the core side, you can see that we've stripped out a lot of the information, and this doesn't necessarily mean that we're just stopping you from accessing it. It just doesn't make sense in Revit.

Like today, we don't use the design line technology, which is something we use heavily on the core side. So pretty much all of the UI that you see on the core under services, we don't need. So we've been able to strip most of that out. The only thing that we think we might need that we'll need to add at some point is probably the abbreviation. Other than that, I think what we have here is a good foundation for moving forward with services. Again, if there's any feedback on this, you can hit the Provide Feedback link in FDM, tell us what you think.

So the part templates. Like I said, this is where we define the combinations of the content that work together, that allow us to model what we need to model in Revit. Right here, we're looking at a threaded and welded range, and we're looking at the threaded parts. So this is something that a user puts together. All the parts should work alongside each other. All the installation types should work together, and enable us to build up the MEP site.

There are other pieces of data in here that we're looking at trying to consolidate into a single view. So there's more design work happening here. We're not really happy with this iteration. So hopefully, we can win over with some of the redesigns that we're doing. And you can see those if you hit the QR code. It'll give you access to some of the Figma pages that we're building, we're building the UI on. That should give you the ability to provide feedback. If not, you can get the feedback from FDM.

And again, a combination of looking at what we have available on the call side, which is, looking at service templates, you can see where we kind of layers deep in dialogues here. We want to flatten everything out from having to have all these dialogues open into what we call a single pane of glass, so you can see in FDM, we've just got these tabs. There's other way forward, where we use accordions, like you'll see on the design. So either way, we're trying to simplify the UI just to make things easier for users.

Obviously, overwhelming new users with complex UI, like you see on the call side, is not the way forward. So part search, this is one of the new features that we've added. We've just wrapped this up, which is going to be going live soon. This is improving what we currently had, which was a tree structure. And the tree structures are user-defined as tree structure. So the BIM manager who creates that initially understands how it's structured.

Anyone coming in thereafter or someone that's not familiar with that configuration, they're going to struggle to find things, so we wanted to have more of a shopping experience. So we came up with this kind of UI, which is fairly common across lots of applications where we have the ability to filter for pieces of data.

Right now, we're only looking at three pieces that we actually consume from prod info. And what that means is we've actually dragged information from an external database that a user set up, and we're pulling that data through into the parts, so we're always interrogating part data. We're not relying on external data. So we can go in here. We can search for brands. We can search for product range or a material. All of that data is live on the product.

And then we can also do a search if we want to drill down even further. So either way, we're hoping users can get to the content much, much quicker than having to navigate through a tree structure that they may not understand.

In here, we're looking at cards. You can also switch to a table view. And we're also contemplating having a side panel, which will show more data, so that's, again, something that we're looking at from a design perspective. So again, comparing to legacy, like I said, we have a tree structure. That's fairly well understood by most users, especially the ones that create it. But it just gives you a side by side comparison of what we're looking at. It's fairly similar, but hopefully fewer clicks we can get to the data that we need.

And again, the redesigns are on the QR code, so if you want to look at those and join the conversation, please do that. So part editor, again, something that we're continuing to improve. Right now, it's just looking at the geometry. We're looking at extending that to looking at pipe options and other pieces of data that are assigned to the product lists. But essentially, what we have is a flattened out view of the preview, and then all of the engineering data, and the icons and the names everything else that you expect to see.

And side by side, you'll see, again, on the call side, we have the table, which is a button that gives you a dialog with the table in there. Like I said, to have a single pane of glass, we flattened out on the FDM side. But this have more to do, so more options to add in here. We need to organize the data little bit better. So again there's another design that we're looking that's going to enable us to really get to that single pane of glass.

So components, there's multiple components we're currently only looking at connectors and materials here, but there's much, much more in the core side that we need to add, but we're looking at doing that when we get onto supporting sheet metal, which is a little bit further down the line. So right now, these two pieces of data are very similar in the framework, so I'm only touching on one of them. So the connectors, initially, when you look at any of the components, you're going to see a table of data.

That table is going to give you access to some of the main information that you're going to need to identify what it is that you're trying to find and edit. So in here, you can use the search. You can also use sort on the table headings to find what it is that you want. Then you can click on the table, the row, to enable the context ribbon to do things like copying, editing, deleting, or viewing the relationship manager. Drilling into any of these pieces of data, we'll give you a form.

That form is currently tabbed, but there are other ways that we could organize the data. And this just gives you access to the information that you might want to change. So if you're copying something that exists already, you want to change the name the group, the demands, et cetera, configure it how you want to configure it, and we also have tables of data. Now, there's going to be support here for calculations and importing data, which will be in the form of a CSV.

So you don't manually have to go through and punch in all this information, which is great. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we always get is having support for import, possibly export as well, so that's going to be in place. And again, side by side. So the connector, again, it's nested deep inside layers of dialogues. We want to flatten that out, which we have done. We've opted for tabs. We could go accordions. One thing that we're missing currently is the preview, which we're looking at adding, but it's probably no time soon.

It might be after the first production release, which may be summer time next year. But either way, we think the preview itself needs to be done differently. Instead of a 3D model, we think it might be better as a 2D cross-section. So we've got all these kind of conversations with users that we need to have to figure out what that needs to look like.

So specifications, again, all the specification is based kind of loosely around the same pieces of UI. We've got a table of data. We've only got one entry in here, but this could be a huge list of information. , Again you've got the paging controls and search. So editing the data is a little bit laborious here. We've got multiple tabs and multiple windows that we don't like. Again, it's another area to redesign. But either way, we've got information here that you can configure in the same way that you can on the call side.

So you go through, click on the tables. You have a list of the data that's available. Click on those entries and then you get the table. This allows you to configure things how you want it. So this is pretty much pulling together all of the components and configuring those to work automatically when you're in the Revit environment. So side by side, again, similar to the way we define things in the call side. And in fact, it's probably more complex the way we have it now.

We are looking at redesigning this again, so we've got a new design for how we can handle spec data, which is quite nice. So again, if you want to pass on any feedback from there, that's going to be welcome.

And then, the finale, which is the relationship manager. So this is something that currently is not possible on the call side, certainly not possible through the UI. You can possibly get something similar using scripts or maybe the API, but this is a graphical mapping visual experience that spells out all of the relationships from any of the data that we currently have. This is quite limited at the moment. We're going to build this out moving forward. Certainly, we get on to the sheet metal side. There's going to be more to add here and maybe estimating, et cetera.

But what you can do is you can pick any piece of data, so a connector, a pipe fitting, template service, and you can jump into the relationship manager and find out what's connected upstream downstream. So it gives you a really good high level view of, if I make a change here, what's this going to impact? And right now, on the call side, like I say, we don't do a very good job of validating changes. We'll just allow you to break things. So when we get to FDM, things are in a pretty bad state.

All of this here is held together with back end codes, grids, et cetera. So if you make a change in one place, that iterates through all of the other changes. So for example, if you change the connector on a part, that's going to iterate through. You're going to see the mapping all the way through to the services. If you edit a part on a service template, on a part template, that's going to iterate through into services. And then you can just follow the journey through here visually. So this is where we get into live demo. So, Dave, your turn.

DAVE MANGHAM: Now, we're into the nervous bit, where this is actually live. So what you can see here on the screen is the actual live environment that Craig's been just running through with the slides. So I've actually-- I'm actually in the part search section here, very, very powerful tool list that that's been developed, which enables you to type in some trigger search words, and this will search through the whole of the content that's in the config and narrow down the word search to specific parts as you can see there.

And it's got a nice lazy load going on, so you can see that it, as you scroll through, it'll keep refreshing with the parts. You can even be a little bit more granular with your search and narrow the search criteria down to, let's say, for example, let's pick IPEX. So we've got a brand that we're searching for, and also a bend-- sorry, a description. So I can remove that description if I so wish, and it's good. Sorry, I've just got to jump on there, get rid of that.

And that will just enable me to see all the bands, sorry, all the components stay in the apex brand, and then we've got a range that we can narrow down. You'll notice that there's zero components in these ranges, but the 69 up here. So I'm just giving you a bit of a heads up and an idea about what the power of the search function. Even down to materials as well, we've only got PVC. As you can see straight away, there's zero components or content that's got any other materials assigned.

And then we can actually start to interrogate these parts, jump in the Edit part. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because I'm just giving you a bit of a feel for the environment, but we're going to drill down a little bit further with Louie in a moment, who's going to show us some content creation. And then we're going to consume that in the Revit environment. So that's just taking a bit of a while to build, but I'll jump back into the-- give you a heads up here.

There's the services section, which Craig had a slide on. We can click on a service, just randomly pick a service. And something that Craig touched on was the relationship manager. So we're going to show you that a bit later as well.

CRAIG FARISH: From here, lots of things we can do, so we can create new content. We can edit existing content. We can look at the relationship manager. So first of all, we'll look at the Edit part. So we have this LMV preview of the geometry. This is similar to what we've got in the course side, just through a WebAssembly. We can use these cool LMV tools if we wish. What we currently don't have the ability, to do those change the color of a part.

We think we might be able to do that when we start looking at the finishes, adding that into FDM. But we've got a cool widget that we can change size, or we can use the geometry table to change sizes. We can edit the data in line. We can assign or remove connectors. Going back to search, we can also jump into the relationship manager. So this is going to be where we can find out where this part is used. As you can see, this is not currently assigned to any templates.

But downstream, we should see the make up of this part, so we can see the types of connectors that are assigned and any of the data that's downstream from the connector, which is currently limited to only rates. But down here, when we get into estimating, there's going to be much more data. We can see the materials and the material specifications that are available and the part spec, if it's in use. From here, we can also change focus onto a particular connector.

So we can see which parts are currently using this connector by using the set focus option. And then we go upstream from here, we see the list of parts. And again, if you continue upstream from these guys, you'll see if these are currently used on templates, and then services, if in use. As you can see, most of this data isn't.

So now, we'll switch into a live environment. So I've got a Revit model open that we've built out for the preview, which is using the Snowden towers project. We've built out the chilled water piping with a kind of a chiller that we've added onto the rooftop. And what we're looking at here is the ability to use FDM to give us quick changes. So what we're looking at is the service that's been used here, we've got this 45 elbow, and it's allowing us to run at 45 degrees here to miss whatever objects are in the way.

What we ideally need to do is run these parallel to the ductwork, so that we can span the whole thing with the hitch bracket. Right now, we don't have a variable angle elbow. And in the field, on the welders, usually what we'll do is we'll use a 45 elbow and miter it to give us the desired angle, which is actually 42.5 degrees. So I'm going to have to call back into the office in theory, give Louie a shout, and ask Louie to add me a variable angle bend.

So he's going to do that in FDM, and then we're going to show you the workflow of how we pull that data back into Revit. So I'll stop here and hand it over to Louie.

LOUIE MDANAT: All right, so I got the-- Craig, I got your notification. We need a mitered elbow added to the service. So basically, we just got to make sure we're in the right configuration. So we are in imperial database, quite cool. We'll go, we have to actually create the part first. So let's just go and build one real quick. That was a well bent elbow. So I'm just going to filter to elbows, find the best one to be my template. So I guess in this case, I'm just going to use this.

I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to call it a mitered elbow. And I'm just making sure we got the well band, range, geometry. Let's investigate in the body. So in this case, we want to set this to instant. I mean, we technically just unlocked the angle for this elbow. I'm just making sure connectors are fine. We can apply this. So now, the part has been added, and we just need to go back and add it to the service template. So there's a few ways to do that.

We can go directly to the relationship manager, find the service, and then go to the part template. And actually, we'll just kind do that for now. So we were looking at the threaded, welded, chilled water return or supply, both of them consuming the same part template or service template in this case. So it's going to go into-- you can go into the service. And you can tell this is the part template that we need to modify. So that's one way of doing this.

You can go back and select it and click on the relationship manager. Expand this and navigate to the part template. In this case, here, we got it. We can do edit, jump to the template itself, and they're going to go to the parts. And this is where we can switch back and forth between different tabs in the legacy product. So I'm just going to switch to the welded. Before I add the part, I want to make sure I sign the right size restriction. In this case, it's welded.

And then from here, I'll just add to the plus side. And then, again, I can filter it down to well bend, and pick this one. And then, we can just kind of move it to the right spot. Let's see It's fine. You can do apply. And then, that template is modified. Craig should get a notification on his FDM. And then all I have to do is just reload the Revit file and he should be consuming this new part.

CRAIG FARISH: So I should have the changes from Louie. So you can see that on my FDM sync, the configuration. We've got a badge saying unsynced, which means there's changes there that need to consume. So what I need to do is hit the hamburger icon and hit the download now option, and that's going to look for the diff. So it's not going to download the entire configuration again. It'll just download the files that have changed. So once we have the sync in place, we can go to Settings and reload configuration.

So all this is doing is repopulating the cache in the project with the data from FDM. So you'll notice the change happen up here. And as I say, we are currently developing this, so we are just pushing changes into the environment. So you can see, instead of the file name, we're just getting this skewed at the moment. That will change. But ultimately, the changes come through. I can see the new part on my service. So this should be now a variable angle part, so I can replace these guys.

So first thing we're going to do is make sure I'm on the right service, so I need my ribbon. And we've got an option up here for show service. So we can click on a part in the model, show service, and it'll give us the right service. This guy should have access now to the angle, which I do. So on here, I'm going to set this to 24.5 degrees, and then place on the end of the service to create similar on the pipe, and hopefully, this should run parallel, which it looks like it does.

And then the pipe to run North, we need 65.5 degrees, and that should pull it back in line. And then, there's various ways that you can align these guys. You can use the align tool or you can drag it. I prefer to drag and connect that up. And then, just the same thing on the other service, so we change service to that guy. And this is going to be a 24.5, 65.5.

So now, we can get a couple of hitch brackets across these services and support them all in one run. So that's pretty much showing the workflow from kind of the request for a change side all the way through propagating the changes back FDM into APS and then back into Revit.

DAVE MANGHAM: And so that concludes the session on Fabrication Data Manager. We hope you got something, some insight into what FDM will do and what is the direction that it's heading in. And if you've got any questions, feel free to get them through on the channel, the FDM forum that Craig mentioned earlier. And I think there was a QR code in one of the slides as well. We should shoot you that to the site too. Yeah, please, your questions through to. So once again, thanks very much for joining us.

LOUIE MDANAT: Yeah.