Explore the advanced features of the measure tool in Navisworks to get precise measurements of your models. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to use this tool, including tips for positioning, saving viewpoints, and enabling specific measurement settings for maximum accuracy.
Key Insights
- The measure tool in Navisworks permits users to derive accurate measurements from their 3D models, acting like a virtual tape measure. One can leverage this tool to measure specific parts of a model, such as the glass within a door.
- Proper positioning and viewpoint management play a significant role in enabling accurate measurements. Users can save viewpoints to maintain consistency and make the process smoother.
- For consistent measurement results, users should ensure the correct settings are enabled, including checking all checkboxes under measure and snapping options, and setting linear units to feet and inches fractions with 1/8 fractional display precision.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering the measure tool and we'll be using the metogate model that we used in the first couple of videos. Once your model's open, I'd like you to make sure that the saved viewpoints panel is open.
If your scene looks something like this and you don't have a tab over there, let's go up to the viewpoint tab and in save, load, and playback, select the dialog launcher and then just make sure that your auto height is turned off. So the measure tool allows you to use a virtual tape measure in Navisworks to get some actual values of measurements from your model. For this example we'll be using this door and we'll be measuring the glass within that door.
So the first thing I'd like you to do is to get in a good position where that door is directly in front of you and we have a good view to work with. It doesn't have to be exactly centered, just somewhere where we can clearly see the door and be able to pick some points on it. Once you have that view set, then right click on the saved viewpoints panel and save a viewpoint.
Call this one door. You can also hit the camera on the save viewpoints, save, load, and playback panel. And then let's get our measure tool ready to go.
It's in the review tab and it's the first panel under that review tab. What I'd like you to do first is to select the dialog launcher that opens the measure options. If yours is docked like I have shown here, then just tear it away from that and set it somewhere else out of the way.
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I'm putting mine on the bottom left. And then go to options and we need to make sure that we are consistent between what I am showing you here and what you have on screen. In measure, make sure that all four of these checkboxes are checked on.
Second, in display units, linear units should be set to feet and inches fractions and fractional display precision should be set to 1 eighth. And then just drop down to the snapping selection and snap to vertex, snap to edge, and snap to line vertex should be all checked on. Once you have those set, hit OK.
And let's start to measure. On the top left, the first button in the measure panel is the measure split button. And this is split between your previously used tool and all of the tools that are available.
We're going to start with point to point. And because we have snapping on, we have the ability to simply drag our cursor over either an edge or a vertex and you'll see the icon change. Once the icon changes, you know that if you select, then you're going to get that exact edge that you're hovering over.
So I'd like you to pick one edge on the top and one edge on the bottom of this window so we can get the height. Now I've drawn a diagonal line, which means that this readout is not actually going to be the height of the window, but rather this blue line will be. And that blue line is telling me that that is z equals 7 feet 8 inches.
You wanted to invert that, you could just select the bottom and then select the top. We can get more efficient at this and see if we wanted to know the height and the width at the same time. We could just select the bottom left vertex of the window and then select the top right vertex.
And we'll see that our z readout is given to us as well as our y readout. And I'm going to get real close to see if, just to verify, see if we got the right spots. And there's the start, which is that bottom vertex.
And that looks correct. And then I'll navigate forward and up to the second vertex. And it looks like, yes, we do have the correct points to measure from.
And if you hit the clear button, then your dimension will go away. So let's look at some of the other measure tools. If you hit the down arrow at the split button, if we select a point to multiple points, then this tool will allow us to create one point and then measure in different directions from that point.
So as an example, let's select the bottom left corner of the window. And if we want to know the width of the window, we can simply select the bottom right corner and it will give us our real-time readout. And say if we want to know the height from that same point it's already attached to, we can select the top of the window and we'll see that it gives us our new readout.
We can continually draw a line from that one point without having to reselect that point every single time. Hit clear to get rid of the measurement. The next one is point line, and this one will allow us to accumulate a bunch of dimensions.
If we want to know the circumference of this window, for some reason, then we can select each of the vertices. And this readout is actually the accumulated sum of all of the lengths that we've drawn so far. Hit clear to get rid of that one.