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 Meadowgate.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. Item Tools allow you to transform your objects on screen temporarily, so you can explore if things would work better in a different position, at a different scale, or simply to move things out of the way so you can 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. 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 get the whole chair. 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 these are all the things that you can do with this object. We're going to start with Move. When you select Move, you'll see the button turn blue, which means it's toggled on, and you'll see a gizmo appear. That gizmo is centered on 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: Z is blue, Y is green, and X is red. If I hover my cursor over, say, the X-axis, and press the left mouse button, then I can move this chair constrained to the X-axis. I can't move it up or down—it's simply left or right, depending on where you're looking on screen. Left or right.
And if I were to select the Y-axis, it will move toward the camera and away from the camera, from the current position I'm in. And if I select Z, it will 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 release the left mouse button. So it's a click and then release action.
To stop the Move tool, or to get rid of the gizmo that's on screen, you can just deselect that button. If the button is 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 press my left mouse button over one of the planes, and it's constrained to being rotated about the origin (the small white ball), in whatever direction the plane is aligned. 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 object at once by just pressing the left mouse button over the origin and dragging your cursor away from that origin. If you get something that looks strange, you can always use Reset Transform, and your chair—or whatever object you have selected—will return to its 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 unpin the Transform panel 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 showing the Selection color, which is blue, because the object is still selected. If I press Escape, you'll see the actual changes that we've made.
Selection color is cleared once the object is deselected. I'm going to turn off Scale just so we don’t see the gizmo. You can change the color, and we have a number of index colors you can choose from.
You can also define any custom color you want. You can add colors to the custom palette, and now my chair appears greenish. And just like how Reset Transform works, if you want this chair to go back to its original appearance, simply hit Reset Appearance and it will revert to its default color.
Another very important tool is the Hide tool, and this is best accessed using the shortcut CTRL + H. It's a little tricky, but very important. If we select Hide, the object that we had selected is now hidden, and you'll see that reflected in the Selection Tree—right here where it says Chair Swivel, it's now gray.
Because it's gray, that means everything underneath that object is also gray. I say it's tricky because, with that object hidden, I can collapse A Desk, and now it’s lost among the other A Desks, and I’d have no idea there was an object there if I needed to turn it back on. I'm going to hit CTRL + Z to unhide that object—just be careful when hiding objects so you're not burying them in your Selection Tree.
I'll get into how to track hidden objects in a future video when we cover Selection Sets, but for now just be cautious. If you'd like to unhide an object without using Undo, you can simply hit CTRL + H again with the object selected, and it will come back. The last Item Tool I’d like to cover is the Hold tool.
I'm selecting my chair again, going into Item Tools, and right here we’ll see the Hold tool. This tool is interesting because it constrains the object to your camera when the Hold button is active. I'm turning it on now.
It's blue, so I know it’s active. If I use the Walk tool now, I can move around the model, and the chair will move with the camera. If I deselect Hold and walk away, the chair stays floating in mid-air.
It's a neat concept for repositioning an object. I'm turning Hold back on to move it again—but of course, we can always use Reset Transform to bring it back to its original position. So those are the basic transform tools.
We’ll 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.