Managing The Advanced Features Of Our Digital Drawing Mark-ups
How to best leverage the embedded intelligence within your mark-ups to most effectively address review findings.
Brian Novello
April 6, 2022
How We’re Improving CHECKSET Review for Our Customers
We've upgraded five major features of CheckSET’s drawings mark-ups that are all accessible through Bluebeam when review PDF is downloaded from the Review Report.
Discipline Overlays: For select architectural plans, the corresponding disciplines drawings are clipped and overlaid onto the sheet. Each discipline can be independently managed through dedicated layers allowing end-users to control which disciplines are displayed.
Search Comments: All comments made by our expert reviewers can be searched from within the drawing mark-up PDF. This feature is especially helpful when you are filtering a large number of comments and need to identify comments related to specific term.
Filter Comments by Discipline: Each comment is tagged by the corresponding disciplines that are potentially impacted by the review finding. Filtering the comments based on the discipline enables your team to quickly assess what scope needs to be coordinated with which consultant.
Sort by Comment Type: For every comment our experts make, we categorize what type of comment they are. Having the ability to then sort all the review comments by the different categories empowers your team to address high priority issues first.
Critical Issues: Manage the real-time status of all review comments so your team know which items have been resolved, and which still need to be addressed.
Using Layers to Organize Discipline Overlays for Coordination.
Layers can be quickly displayed or hidden, which allows you to filter the amount of information you are seeing on the page to help you focus on your current task. Our review team utilizes these layers to create a dynamic overlay of discipline drawings in plan which streamlines the identification and communication of potential conflicts.
Discipline drawings are overlaid onto the architectural sheets to highlight conflicts or other coordination issues. Each discipline is uniquely colored and managed through the layer panel. Opacity settings can be adjusted within the properties panel.
Using Layer Visibility
One of the principle advantages of using layers is the ability to toggle the visibility of specific layers, turning some off and others on, to create different views. This can be done by toggling layer visibility on the fly or by using layer configurations which can be easily recalled later.
Toggling Layer Visibility
To toggle layer visibility, open the Layers tab within Bluebeam and do one of the following:
To show or hide a layer, click the box to the left of the layer's name to toggle its visibility. A layer with an eye in the box is visible and a layer with an empty box is hidden.
To show or hide a parent layer and all its child layers at the same time, right-click the parent layer and select Show Layer. This toggles the show/hide setting of both the parent layer and all child layers.
To show only one layer, right-click the layer name and select Isolate. The selected layer and its children will be shown and all other layers will be hidden.
When searching by a key term, any review comments that do not include the search term is automatically grayed out.
Searching Review Comments
All comments made by our expert reviewers can be searched from within the drawing mark-up PDF. This feature is especially helpful when you are filtering a large number of comments and need to identify comments related to specific term.
To filter by search term:
Go to View > Tabs > Markups or press ALT+L to show the Markups list.
On the Markups list toolbar, click inside the Search field.
Enter the desired search term. The Markups list will be filtered down to only those markups that have the search term in at least one of the columns. Further, any markups that are filtered out will be dimmed on the PDF.
Filter Comments by Discipline
For every comment our review team provides, we also indicate which disciplines are potentially impacted by that comment. This feature enables team to quickly identify which comments need to be coordinated with which consultants. By individually selecting the comment, the corresponding impacted disciplines are shown within the properties fields (see above).
Additionally, the discipline tags can be accessed through the mark-up panel as a filtered field.
To filter by discipline in a column:
On the Markups list toolbar, click Filter. A triangle icon appears next to each discipline column heading in the Markups list.
Click the triangle icon associated with the desired discipline.
Repeat as desired to filter by other disciplines or values.
Sort By Comment Type
For every comment our experts make, we categorize what type of comment they are. Having the ability to then sort all the review comments by the different categories empowers your team to address high priority issues first.
For example, if your team wanted to first address all code related comments, you could filter the mark-ups by comment category, effectively grouping all the code related comments. Using the Markups list toolbar, click Filter. A triangle icon appears next to the category column heading in the Markups list
Comment Categories
Building Code
Accessibility (ADA)
Constructability
Discipline Coordination
Documentation Issue
Missing Documentation
Recommendation
All "Critical Issues" will be tagged within the comment's meta data and can be found within the Properties Panel in Bluebeam.
"Critical Issue" Flagged Comments
Critical Issues are flagged comments that our experts believe your team should inspect and address within the contract documents, regardless of the comment category. Critical issues can range from non-compliant code or accessibility issues to conflicting discipline scope that will lead to change orders. When strategizing which comments to address first, “critical issues” are the secondary tier of priority, following the Top Ten items.
