Explore Navisworks object overrides, a feature that allows users to assign different colors and materials to various components of a model for easy differentiation. Learn how to save these changes in one viewpoint without affecting others, and how to use these viewpoints as tools for adjusting the color and render style of your model as needed.
Key Insights
- Object overrides in Navisworks allow users to change the colors and materials of different parts of their models, which can be helpful when exploring a building and identifying which components belong to which models or trades.
- These changes can be saved to specific viewpoints without affecting the overall model, providing a flexible way to visually analyze different aspects of the project.
- By using viewpoints as tools, users can quickly and easily adjust the color and render style of their models on the fly, enhancing their ability to detect clashes and other potential issues in the design process.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering object overrides, and we'll be using the BIM 361 complete model that we've been using since lesson two, and that model is nwf format. I'm actually going to switch to my Navisworks file set format because we have so many files in this one directory.
So there we go, 361 complete. Now when we exported to nwc format from Revit and then imported into Navisworks, we received a number of materials and colors from the Revit file, like so, and we can actually save these colors and materials in one viewpoint and then go on to another viewpoint and change these colors, like assign one color for the entire plumbing model and another color for the entire mechanical model. This is sometimes useful if we're exploring a building and we want to see visually what component we're looking at belongs to which of the models or which trade.
So before we get involved with changing all of our objects, let's save a viewpoint of our home view right now. So I'm going to right click on the save viewpoints panel and then go to save viewpoint, and we'll call this one home full render. With full render of course I'm referring to the viewpoint property of the render style mode, which is set to full render.
Right click on the home overrides and then go to update. Next let's right click on the viewpoint that we just created and then go to edit. On the bottom here we have the option to save some attributes and we can check on this button that says override appearance.
Now we're going to be dealing with object overrides which are appearance overrides, and to save those to whatever viewpoint we're working with we'll have to have this checked on. Now this will actually save everything all the changes that we make to our objects in another viewpoint while keeping this viewpoint with these object overrides which are default. Let's right click on the viewpoints again and go to save viewpoint, and this will be home, we'll call this overrides.
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Now we can do the same thing with this viewpoint and check on override appearance, and let's start changing the appearance of our model. So for the architectural let's select the model itself, right click and then go to override item and then override color. Let's assign a color of white to it and hit okay, and then let's change our render style to shaded.
Next let's select the architectural model one more time, right click and then go to override item, override transparency. Let's move the slider over to mostly transparent and hit okay, and then deselect by hitting escape. Now you can see that our architectural model is faded back a little bit and we can see the rest of our structure and other components that are within the building.
To save this, right click on the home overrides and then go to update. Now if we ever want to switch back to full render, we could simply select the viewpoint. If we want to go back to our transparent and white architectural, then we can select the home overrides.
So let's change some of our other colors of the models on the left. Structural, we can right click and then go to override item, override color, let's assign gray. In fact, let's do a darker gray than that.
There we go. And then plumbing, we can override the color to be a light blue. Mechanical, we can override to be let's say lavender, and electrical override as orange.
Now if we navigate into our model, we can easily differentiate what is electrical in the orange and what is mechanical in the purplish lavender color. And we can see within the walls that we have some plumbing occurring as well as our sinks. And if we go over to the restrooms, wherever they went over here, you'll see the water clots are also a light blue color.
And don't forget to right click on the home overrides and update this viewpoint. And now we have a neat little tool, a viewpoints as tools option of turning or changing the color and render style of our model on the fly. Go ahead and save this model.
And that's about all there is to overriding object styles. This should help us when we go into our clash detection.