Visual Impression works within your current design and specification process in many different ways. By design there is not a specific workflow defined for you, instead look at the following situations and see which applies best to your project workflow. Think outside the box as there may be some ways of using Visual Impression that you haven’t thought about before.
Situation 1
Launch Visual Impression from your drawing during the preliminary design to experiment with different fabric and finish alternatives before committing to a take-off.
- Define a scene in the drawing by drawing a boundary around the items you want to include and give the scene a name. The scene boundary is preserved in the drawing so that you can change products in the scene without needing to redefine it.
- Multiple scenes can be defined in a drawing and an item can be in more than one scene.
- If no scene id defined, the default is the entire drawing.
- Drawing edits are prohibited while you are working in Visual Impression and allowed when you exit Visual Impression.
- Fabric and option selections made in Visual Impression can be applied back to the drawing and are included in the take-off.
- If you’re not ready to apply Visual Impression selections to the drawing, but want to save them as alternatives, you can save them to a worksheet file. Worksheet files created this way can be updated against the drawing later in the process.
Situation 2
Launch Visual Impression from Worksheet in the final phase of the project after you’ve done a take-off from the drawing and specified the finishes in Worksheet.
- Run a take-off from the drawing, open Worksheet and specify options and finishes in Worksheet.
- Launch Visual impression from Worksheet and see the scene completely specified.
- Change camera angle, lighting, and go into HQ mode to generate high quality output.
- Worksheet edits are prohibited while you are working in Visual Impression and allowed when you exit Visual Impression.
- Changes made to finishes while in Visual Impression can be applied back to the worksheet or saved as copies of that worksheet with finish and option alternatives.
Situation 3
Launch Visual Impression from Worksheet after you’ve take-off from the drawing and use Visual Impression to visually specify the finishes.
- Run a take-off from the drawing and change the radio button to open the file directly in Visual Impression.
- Visually specify all of the objects in Visual Impression using the Material Activity.
- Worksheet and Visual Impression can be open at the same time, but not working on the same file.
- Changes made to finishes while in Visual Impression can be applied back to the worksheet or saved as copies of that worksheet with finish and option alternatives.
Situation 4
Use Associated Worksheets to keep the products in your drawing and worksheet in synch. Visual Impression can be launched out of Worksheet or the drawing and associated worksheets do the rest.
- Select the Associated Worksheet radio button during the take-off and link your drawing and worksheet together. Note: Only one worksheet can be associated, but additional unassociated visual worksheet can be created.
- Launch Visual Impression out of the drawing or the associated worksheet. Changes made in Visual impression are applied back to the host application and the associated worksheet feature synchronizes them so that both the drawing and the worksheet always contain the same information.
- Product changes can be made in the drawing or worksheet as they are always in synch. Visual Impression can be launched from either application and all product changes are visible.
Situation 5
Complete your drawing and specification and give the worksheet to another project team member to present to the customer and make any necessary finish changes using Visual Impression and Worksheet.
- Visual Impression can open any visual worksheet that came from a drawing takeoff.
- Designers can allow other project team members to make option and finish selections and visualize the project with the customer.
- Changes made with the customer and product change annotations can be saved to the visual worksheet and brought back to the designer for drawing modification.
- Designers can use the Update Against Visual Worksheet feature in the drawing package to bring and finish and option modifications back into the drawing. All changes to product numbers including adding and deleting of products will be ignored. If you want to keep product number and quantity changes in synch it is best to use associated worksheets.
Things to Remember
- Products must originate in a drawing to be visualized in Visual Impression. Visual Impression will not let you add, remove, or move products within the application itself.
- All changes made or assets generated in Visual Impression get saved either to the drawing or to a worksheet (.visual.sp4). Visual impression does not have its own file.
- Finishes and options assigned in any of the software packages can be applied to the others through doing a take-off, applying back to a host application, or updating against a visual worksheet.
- Visual Impression can be launched independently from a host application, but it can only open a visual worksheet file. To open a drawing file, Visual Impression must be launched from within the drawing.
- Working in Visual impression suspends work in the host application. For example, launching from a drawing will not allow further changes to the drawing until Visual Impression is closed.