Explore the functionalities and benefits of Navisworks' section tool in this article. Learn how to enable, manipulate and save section planes within a viewpoint, in order to gain better internal perspectives of your model.
Key Insights
- The article covers the use of Navisworks' section tool, focusing on how to enable and manipulate section planes within a viewpoint for better visibility inside a model.
- It provides a step-by-step guide on creating viewpoints, enabling sectioning, altering the alignment of the section plane, and saving these settings within specific viewpoints.
- The author further demonstrates how to create multiple section planes for different levels of a model, and how to use the sectioning tools to toggle on or off the visibility of the section plane or the transform tool.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering the section tool, I'll teach you how to enable the section plane, and how to manipulate that section plane within a viewpoint so that you can see within your model. We'll be using the metogate.nwd file, so let's open that up right now.
Just hit the open button, and it's in your Lesson 1 folder in metogate.nwd. First thing we need to do is create a viewpoint, one that we can easily use to manipulate our section tool, and so the one that I like to use is from above like this. So once you get to a position that looks sort of like this, you can right click on your save viewpoints panel, and then go to save viewpoint, and we'll save this one as section 1. So the section plane that divides your model, it resides within a viewpoint, so you have to have one to start with, and once you do have that viewpoint set, then you can go up to the viewpoint tab, and then select enable sectioning. This turns on the section plane, and you might see something like I see right here where my plane is actually oriented up and down, and it's cutting everything to the west of that plane of my building.
So for the first section, we want to have a horizontal section plane, and we want that to cut the model from the plane up in the z direction. Once you enable sections, then you'll see that our sectioning tools tab will appear, and we'll see that that enable sectioning button is turned blue, which means it's toggled on, and then our mode tells us that we're using planes instead of box, which is your other option. We're just going to use one plane for the moment, and it's telling us that our current plane is called plane 1, and that's the one that's actually set vertically.
We can change this if we select this alignment, and then go to top, and so what Navisworks has done is aligned the plane 1, our current plane, with the top, which corresponds with this direction on the viewcube. So just like we used the transform tool before, we can select the move to toggle it on. You'll see that turns blue, and our gizmo appears.
Around the gizmo, you can see the section plane that we're using, and you can move this section plane by selecting one of the axes, and then dragging that axis up or down. I'm dragging the z direction, but if you'll notice, if you try to drag the y or the x, then it doesn't actually do anything to your model, because of course it's still, that section plane is still within the same plane, but it does allow you to move your gizmo to a more, I guess, useful location in the case that it's way back here. If we can move it above our model, then it makes it much more visibly useful.
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So why don't you go ahead and set the section plane to the first floor level, and then to save this section location, what you do is you right click on the section 1 viewpoint, and then you go to update, and so that's now saved this position directly to my viewpoint. If I were to go to any other viewpoint, like external 1, you'll see that the building is not cut anymore, enable sectioning is turned off, but when I go back to section 1, that enable sectioning is turned on, and that section plane is exactly where I left it. So let's continue by making another section, this time of the second floor.
We are working with things that we already have, or rather information that we already have. We can start with the section 1 viewpoint, and right click on it, go to add copy, and so now we have an exact replica of our section 1 viewpoint. You want to rename that viewpoint to section 2, and then we can move the section plane up to wherever feels comfortable on the second floor.
And of course to save this location of the section plane, we can right click on section 2 and then go to update. Now we have section 1 positioned and section 2 positioned. Let's continue with section 3, or the third floor.
Let's go to add copy. I'm changing the name of section 2 to section 3, and then I'm moving my section plane up to the third floor. Right click on section 3 and then hit update to save.
If you'd like to get rid of the gizmo and the section plane on screen, then you can just go back up to sectioning tools and then select the move button to turn it off. And now we have all three sections. The section planes are still active because enable sectioning is on, except it's just that our transform tool is not active.
These are live 3D views, so we can actually explore these section cuts. And this is one way of using a viewpoint as a tool, because if we want our section plane to go away, we can simply go to another viewpoint that doesn't have the sections turned on. Or alternately, if we want to go to a view with a section on, then we can simply start by selecting one of our sectioned views.
I'll be covering some more advanced section options in the next video, so make sure if you're going to continue to save this model, you can simply save as middlegateyourname.nwd. And I'll see you in the next video. Thank you.