Overview of Clash Detective
The Clash Detective plugin checks your model and shows you any areas where items interfere or "clash" with each other. Like all plugins, the Clash Detective is a dockable tabbed control bar accessed through the Tools menu (Hint: hold down the Control key to prevent the control bar from docking if necessary). From the Clash Detective control bar you can set up the rules and options for your clash tests, view the results, sort them and produce a report as a text file or in HTML or XML formats. A clash test is a configuration of options, rules and selections used in checking for clashes in a model. These are useful if you have set tests for your model and need to run them as a batch. You can create a number of different clash tests for a model and save them in a JetStream .nwf file for checking with updated models at a later date.
General clash tests that you are required to run on all projects can be set up once, exported and then re-used on subsequent projects. Such tests may be specific to your industry or company; for example, you may always use a particular diameter piping which requires insulating. You could therefore set up a test, which selects all of this piping in the scene and clash test it against the rest of the model to ensure a specific clearance around it is maintained.
Managing a series of clash tests can get complicated, especially if you have a whole set of different layers you want to clash separately. Clash Detective is designed to help you control these clash tests and leave an audit trail of clashes throughout the life of the project.
One simple but time-saving way it does this is by remembering the names of clashes throughout the project's life so you don't have to go through each clash every time you do a test to figure out whether it's a new clash, or one you have already seen. Clash Detective also allows you to assign a status to a clash and can update this status automatically, informing you of the current state of the clashes in the model.
You can set up a batch of clash tests that you could run overnight, every night and for each test, choose the items to clash against, along with the options for the test.