How do you clean your models before sending them to another firm?

[Mats_Knutsson]

Hi,
Trying to be consistent in the way we "clean" our models before sending them to another consultant. It can be a handover to FM or just another consultant using ArchiCAD. Sometimes the builder change architect between stages in the project...
Anyway we have to send the model (pln or pla...(not IFC)) to another consultant and we want to clean out everything that's not crucial for the project. We don't want the other consultant to get our template stuff...

I usually do it like this.
-Bind hotlinks.
-Purge all attributes.
-Delete unused worksheets and schedules.
-Delete publisher sets (most likely all)
-Delete layouts
-Delete views
-Delete favorites
-Delete custom properties
-Save out as .pla
-Zip and I'm ready to go.

This is pretty tedious. Anyone has a better procedure?

Best regards,
Mats

Best reagrds,
Mats

[Erwin Edel]

If a client ends the contract, we have clause where they have pay us a percentage of the remaining work. In 13 years that I am working in this company, we've so far lost the final stages of a project once.

That said, I've also never shared a .PLA with a consultant or client.

I'm wondering if for your solution with pretty much deleting everything, you would benefit from publishing the project to a module, hotlinking this module to an 'emptied' .PLN that you can open, update module and save as .PLA when needed. You can set up a layer combination for the published module to control what information gets sent out. As long as you don't change things like story settings, all you have to do is keep the attributes up to date between the two projects (main + emtpy). Hope the idea is clear.

[Mats_Knutsson]

Erwin wrote:
If a client ends the contract, we have clause where they have pay us a percentage of the remaining work. In 13 years that I am working in this company, we've so far lost the final stages of a project once.

That said, I've also never shared a .PLA with a consultant or client.

I'm wondering if for your solution with pretty much deleting everything, you would benefit from publishing the project to a module, hotlinking this module to an 'emptied' .PLN that you can open, update module and save as .PLA when needed. You can set up a layer combination for the published module to control what information gets sent out. As long as you don't change things like story settings, all you have to do is keep the attributes up to date between the two projects (main + emtpy). Hope the idea is clear.

Hi Erwin,
Swapping consultants is pretty common and a bad thing but it's a little too common. Nothing we can do anything about. For us as an ArchiCAD-office this is extra cumbersome since the necessary remodeling considering the majority is on Revit (sometimes we also get to take over the final stages from another architect...).

I've actually tested the .mod strategy and it is an option but I dislike any additional files... I want to put down a workflow that anyone can do easily and safely. I'll se where I'll land.

Best regards,
Mats

[Erwin Edel]

Hey Mats,

The suggested idea is that you do the 'purge' once in a 2nd file where you hotlink a published module, so it is a matter of publishing the module, opening the 2nd file and saving as .PLA whenever you need to send the model out.

Seems better to having to do the purge everytime

We use this publish workflow a lot for presentation files. So we have 2nd file with a lot of presentation stuff (trees, people, furniture, surrounding buildings etc) that we don't want in the main model, but we also need to be able to keep the main model up to date for the presentation. It is quite fast and idiot proof.

[Christophe Fortineau]

Mats_Knutsson wrote:
We don't want the other consultant to get our template stuff...

Hello,

With a PLN your file will be incomplete to read or work (library, attachment, etc . ...)
With a PLA you share all
> In both cases the file to send will be heavy

So do not share files but share a project with BimCloud and a level of administration previously defined to allow your interlocutor to work or consult your project without being able to retrieve information. Access to a remote project is possible since 2009. This has the great advantage that it is no longer a question of exchanging files but a collaborative work in real time from a server client environment. To try it once is to understand and adopt it.

.