Last month IMAGINIT Technologies, a division of Rand Worldwide announced its latest version of the IMAGINiT Clarity 2022 product suite, its enterprise solution that aims to automate tasks, improve building information modeling (BIM) integrity and collaboration.
If you’re not familiar with IMAGINiT, it is an Autodesk Platinum Partner primarily focused on Autodesk solutions. The company has been around for 40 years and provides solutions, consulting services and training for design and engineering professionals in the manufacturing and building space. IMAGINiT is also the creator of the Scan to BIM[i] solution.
IMAGINiT Clarity was originally launched in 2012 as a web-based solution to enhance the Revit server platform but has recently expanded to include integrations with AutoCAD, Autodesk Civil 3D, BIM 360, Collaboration for Civil 3D, Bentley Systems ProjectWise, Procore and others.
Clarity 2022 now supports Revit 2022 and all earlier versions dating back to Revit 2018, and adds AutoCAD task processing, new data integrations and security enhancements for collaboration.
To learn more about the latest release, we talked to Matt Mason, director of Software Development for Rand Worldwide, who has been with the company for more than 25 years. At Rand, Mason manages the Software Products Group for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) and manufacturing industries.
Before we dive into what’s new in IMAGINiT Clarity 2022, I asked Mason to walk me through how IMAGINiT Clarity initially works and to provide a few examples of how it’s used.
“You can’t really use it without a CAD tool, but it’s not really an add-in in the traditional sense; it’s more like an enterprise tool,” he explained. “People install it on a server inside their company. It provides a sort of an intranet—a sort of web interface for setting up where are the projects, do they live in BIM 360 or do they live in, you know, a folder on the network somewhere? Do they live in a Revit Server or Bentley ProjectWise?” he explained.
“You set up your projects and where they live, and what most people start with is the sort of manual time-consuming tasks that we need to do week in and week out and how do we set those up to happen automatically in the background. A lot of people use it just for things like making PDFs and making DWG files out of Revit files, or that kind of thing—in terms of using files that need to get repeatedly produced and then distributed either inside the organization or outside the organization to a consultant or something like that.”
Mason said that the functionality of Clarity varies for different software applications. For instance, there are tasks that work on Revit file content and AutoCAD file content, and there are tasks that just work with files for moving, copying and backing up.
Some of the specific task automation and analytics features of Clarity for Revit include:
- Print requested PDF sets for Revit. CAD files can reside in a network folder, BIM 360 or ProjectWise. The PDFs can be delivered to eight locations, including ProjectWise, Procore, and others (the process also works the same for AutoCAD).
- Export DWGs and share them to BIM 360, Dropbox, BOX, or an FTP site.
- Back up projects to a specific folder or system. There are tasks that make backups of many location types, such as network folders, Revit Servers, BIM 360, Procore, BIM Track, Glue, SharePoint, Teams, ProjectWise, and others.
- Create data sheets for rooms, equipment and furniture for Revit models.
- Clean up Revit and AutoCAD models and transmit them to stakeholders .
- Clean up models as they come in from partners for Revit models.
- Eliminate potential problems and improve the performance of Revit project integrity with monitoring and notifications, such as increases in file size, unresolved warnings, and more, including: track more than 60 model metrics, provide an overall model health score based on your criteria, highlight projects and models requiring attention and provide visibility at the model, project, group and firm-wide levels
Mason said that currently the above project integrity features apply only to Revit, but noted that the company is planning to expand them to AutoCAD soon.
As far as visibility and business insights go, Clarity enables users to access the rich data in a Revit project to gain an understanding of project performance. Some capabilities include:
- Allow non-Revit users to run reports
- Export model data for use with business intelligence systems
- Use design data to inform business decisions
These capabilities are available only in Revit, but Mason said the company will add AutoCAD and other platforms if there is a demand.
Moving on to the brand-new functionality in Clarity 2022, Mason said the biggest improvement in this release is not only support for Revit 2022 but also deeper support for AutoCAD task processing, where customers can use Clarity for AutoCAD, and not just Revit. “We started slowly bringing AutoCAD into Clarity, but with this release we really pushed into what we call a first-class kind of support where you could use Clarity with just AutoCAD, if you want to,” said Mason.
He said the demand came after IMAGINiT realized that people working in AutoCAD needed help with automation and scripting. “Firms that were multidisciplined, in particular, that were using Clarity to automate the Revit side of their projects really liked it and wished that they had something similar to automate the AutoCAD side of their projects.”
On the Revit side, Mason said that there are many new features around new PDF mechanisms that exist in Revit 2022. There are also new ways for people to automate or develop their own tasks with scripting tools that people use such as pyRevit, a plug-in for helping users developing scripts using the universal Python language. “It’s kind of like the way people use Autodesk Dynamo to make their own sort of custom tasks and automation,” explained Mason. “You can now do the same thing with the pyRevit tool, and we’re just sort of integrating with pyRevit to let people take the pyRevit scripts that they’ve made and drop them into the Clarity platform for automation. It’s handy to be able to mix in those little tools with Clarity, which can help with certain enterprise-level scripting or scheduling.”
He also pointed out that Clarity works a bit behind the scenes—that it’s typically set up by the power users in the firm, while most other users don’t even know much about it because it’s set up and everyone can forget about it. For instance, you could set the software up to pull the latest BIM 360 files and run the pyRevit scripts overnight.
In terms of other integrations, Mason said that recently IMAGINiT is doing more work with integrating Procore so that people can move their files and synchronize their files between BIM 360 and Procore. For example, if changes are made on the BIM 360 side, those changes can automatically be brought over to Procore. Likewise, if the Procore data changes, you can pull the files from Procure and bring that data into BIM 360.
“A lot of the work that we’re doing these days is really around letting people work in the tool that they want to work in and try to do all of the sort of grunt work that might be involved in keeping things up to date in multiple places make that just happen automatically in the background,” said Mason.
Specifically for this release, Clarity 2022 adds integration with business intelligence tools, including Power BI and Tableau to deliver visibility into model health, Autodesk Revit performance, and a variety of Revit project data.
Aside from task automation, Mason said that in general there are other interesting things that Clarity does that are enabled by task automation—say, for example, trying to take data that’s normally locked up inside the Revit model and get it out and make it available to people outside of Revit. Some of what Clarity does is Revit health checks and key performance indicators (KPIs), which you might use to measure Revit models.
The other data-centric area is that Clarity extracts design data out of Revit and puts it into a database while keeping that data fresh by having it perform an export nightly or on whatever time frame it is scheduled to do so.
“We have a variety of tools that are made to help people with business intelligence kinds of questions, said Mason. “So, for example, people working on hospital planning would be able to ask a question like, what was the average size of an operating room across our last five hospital projects?, or something like that. That’s something that people would like to be able to access—that type of data … and we sort of facilitate that by setting up that sort of constant data extraction for all of the projects, and then centralizing it to make it easy to get to. So, yeah, a there’s a variety of things that we’re doing on the data side that are also interesting.”
Another key feature IMAGINiT mentioned about this release is that Clarity 2022 received a security boost. The press release stated, “For remote collaboration environments, Clarity 2022 offers additional security options to enable team members to securely connect with data and view reports across projects. Visibility into model data can now be based on user access within Clarity, giving different team members unique access to data as the project requires.”
To learn more about the latest release, we encourage you to catch the webinar hosted by Mason and other members of the IMAGINiT team called “What’s New in Clarity 2022.”
From what we learned, it sounds like Clarity could certainly be a time saver.
[i] IMAGINiT stopped updating Scan to BIM in 2018 and no longer offers it. However, some of the most popular functions of Scan to BIM will appear in IMAGINiT’s Utilities for Revit 2022 to be released soon.