Learn how to utilize item tools in Navisworks to temporarily transform objects on screen, allowing you to experiment with different positions, scales, and visibility options. These changes do not affect the original model, offering a safe platform to test and understand the positional transformation of objects within your model.
Key Insights
- Item tools in Navisworks provide a range of options to manipulate objects within a model, including moving, rotating, scaling, changing appearance, and hiding objects. This offers tremendous flexibility in exploring different layouts and visibility settings within a model.
- Adjustments made through item tools do not affect the original model but only the currently open model. This allows for safe experimentation without risking changes to the original model.
- The 'Hold tool' is a unique feature that binds an object to your camera, enabling the object to move with the camera. This can be used to easily reposition objects and provide a different perspective on the model.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering item tools, and we'll be using the metalgate.nwd model located in your lesson 1 folder, and we'll also be using the same office 2 viewpoint that we were using for the previous selection resolution video. So item tools allow you to transform your objects on screen temporarily, so you can explore if things would work better in a different position, or in a different scale, or simply to move things out of the way so you could see them better.
It's important to understand that any changes that you make to your model do not affect the original model, but only affect your current model that you have open. We're going to be using this chair that we were practicing selection resolution on last time, and I'm going to select that chair, and currently it's selected only the back and the arms of the chair, but because we've practiced on this model before, I know that I can simply select this, or change the selection resolution to last object, and I will know that I will get the whole chair. So once you select the object that you want to edit, your item tools tab will appear, and this tab appears in green.
It's called a contextual tab, and so these are all the things that you can do with this object. Then we're going to start with move. When you select move, see the button turns blue, so it's toggled on, and you'll see a gizmo come on, and that gizmo is centered about the extents of the selected objects that are going to be transformed.
You'll see that we have three axes and three planes on this gizmo, and z is set to blue, y is set to green, and x is set to red. If I were to hover my cursor over, say, the x-axis, and I were to press the left mouse button, then I can move this chair constrained to x. I can't move it up or down, it's simply left or right, depending on where you're looking at on screen. Left or right.
And if I were to select the y-axis, it'll move toward the camera and away from the camera, from the current position I'm in. And z, it'll move up and down on screen. The planes allow you to move this object in two axes at once.
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It's constrained to x and y by selecting the bottom plane, x and z by selecting the left plane, and then y and z if you select the right plane. To place your object, of course, just unclick the left mouse button. So it's a and then releasing.
To stop the move tool, or to get rid of the gizmo that's on screen, you can just unselect that button. Button is on, no longer blue, that means move is not active anymore. You can move on to rotate, and this works much the same way.
I can select or press my left mouse button over one of the planes, and it's constrained to being rotated about the origin, which is that little white ball, in whatever direction the plane is lying in. So those are both the positional transform tools. The other tool is scale, and scale will allow you to stretch your object out.
You can stretch it in one direction or another, or in two directions at the same time. You can also enlarge the entire thing at once by just pressing the left mouse button over the origin, and then just dragging your cursor away from that origin. And if you get something strange looking like this, then you can always reset transform, and your chair, or whatever objects you have selected, will go back to their original form.
We can get much more accurate with this tool if you expand the transform panel, and let's pin this open. I currently have scale as my tool, and I can actually change the scale in the x, y, and z directions. If I were to, say, put 2 in x, 2 in y, and 2 in z, I have effectively doubled the scale of my chair.
And we can reset, of course. We can also change the appearance of any item that we have selected. You can take off the pin on the transform so that little panel will go away.
And in the appearance panel, we can change the transparency of our object. Right now I have made it 56% transparent, and it's important to note that right now it's a selection color, which is blue, and that's because I have it selected. If I were to hit escape, then you'll see the actual changes that we've made.
Selection color, escape, deselected. I'm going to turn off scale just so we don't see that gizmo. You can change the color, and we have a number of index colors you can choose from.
You can also pick any or define any color that you want to. You can add things to custom colors, and I'll see that my chair is now green-ish. And the same way that reset transform works, if you want this chair to go back to its original appearance, then we just hit reset appearance, and it will reset back to its original form.
Another very important tool is the hide tool, and this is best accessed with the shortcut C-O-S-S-Control-H right next to it. It's kind of tricky, but also very important. If we were to select hide, the object that we had selected is now hidden, and we'll see that reflected in our selection tree right here where it says chair swivel, it's now gray.
And because this is gray, that means everything underneath that object is now gray too. I say it's tricky because with that object hidden, I can collapse my desk A, and it now is lost in all of these other desk A's, and I will have no idea that there was ever an object there if I needed to turn it on again. I'm going to hit CTRL Z to unhide that object, and just be real careful when you hide objects that you're not burying them within your selection tree.
I'm going to get into how to track your hidden objects in a future video when we cover selection sets, but for now just be careful. If you'd like to unhide an object without doing undo, you can simply hit CTRL H again with that object selected, and it'll come back. And the last item tool I'd like to cover is the hold tool.
So I'm selecting my chair again, I'm going to item tools, and right here we'll see we have a hold tool. Now this is very interesting because it will constrain the object to your camera when you have this hold button selected. I'm going to turn it on now.
It's blue, so I know it's on. And if I were to use my walk tool now, I can move around my model, and it's actually moving the chair in the model as I'm moving the camera. If I were to unselect hold, then walk away from it, now that chair is floating in mid-air.
So it's kind of a neat concept on how to transform an object. I'm turning hold back on to move it back, but of course we can always reset transform and get it back to where it belongs. So those are the basic transform tools.
We will be using these quite a bit when we get into the future sections of Timeliner and Clash Detective, so get familiar with them and have fun with them. I'll see you in the next video.