Discover how to effectively utilize viewpoints within the Navisworks modeling framework. Learn how to create and access viewpoints, and understand how viewpoints can contain crucial information like visibility, frame rate, and more.
Key Insights
- The Navisworks model allows users to create and access viewpoints - saved views that can contain information like visibility, frame rate, and more. These viewpoints can be navigated much like a 'home' view, and can be used to save multiple views within a single project.
- Viewpoints can be manually ordered, renamed, and even duplicated within the Navisworks model. These viewpoints only save when explicitly told to do so, meaning users can navigate away from a viewpoint without changing its saved state.
- Users are also able to manipulate the properties of viewpoints, adjusting factors like the field of view (FOV) and the perspective versus orthographic views. The Navisworks model also allows users to change the render style for every viewpoint, thereby facilitating a variety of different modes and viewpoints within the same project.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, we'll be looking at viewpoints, what they do, how to create them, and then how to access them. And we'll be using the metagate model for this video.
So the first time we used this model, we took a look at how to use the viewcube and how to create a home view. And the home view is, of course, a view that we can save and then go back to in the case that we want to see this home view. Or if we get lost, we can go straight back to it and we know where we are.
If I were to navigate away and I hit home, I would go straight back. Well, viewpoints work the same way, except you can have a lot of them. They also hold some information like visibility and like what things are hidden or how fast your frame rate is, what we'll be looking at, how to save multiple views within your project.
So first off, let's go up to the viewpoint tab. And in the viewpoint tab, you'll see that the first panel on the left is called save, load, and playback. This is what controls our viewpoints.
So there is a panel or a tool that you can use that shows you all your saved viewpoints and access that by hitting this little dialog launcher. Now, the metagate.nwd has some saved viewpoints. And to access each of these saved viewpoints, you just simply click on each of them and you'll see that it changes the camera position to the ones defined by that viewpoint.
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You should also note that you can change the names of these viewpoints by right clicking and selecting rename. And we can call this anything we'd like. You can have two viewpoints with the same name.
You may, after a while, confuse the two or three or four, but just know that Navisworks will not prompt you if you have two of the same named viewpoint. Now, viewpoints will only be saved if I explicitly tell Navisworks to save a viewpoint. So for example, if I were in the second rename, actually let's use external three, a viewpoint, and I navigate away from that viewpoint, I'm no longer in external three.
It doesn't actually update that viewpoint. If I were to select it, it would go back to original position. If you would like to use a viewpoint as a starting point to create another viewpoint or to update the viewpoint itself, for example, if I wanted to make a viewpoint of the sign and I wanted that to actually be external three, I can right click on external three and then go to update.
And now if I go back to external three, then this position is now my viewpoint. If you don't want to overwrite your viewpoints, like if I want a view that is of the sign but farther back, all I have to do is hit save viewpoint after I navigate and you'll see that a new viewpoint is created at the end of my list. And we could call this external three two, just as an example.
Now the program doesn't automatically alphabetize your viewpoints. It puts them in the order that they were created. If you'd like to change the position or the order of your viewpoints, you can simply drag the viewpoint to the position where you'd like it to be.
Alternately, you can right click on the saved viewpoints panel and select sort and it will alphabetize your list for you. You can copy viewpoints if we wanted to copy this one. We can simply select it, right click, and go to add copy.
You'll see that it places a one after the name. I'm changing the name to three and if I navigate away, right click, and update, then that is now my three viewpoint position. You can change some other properties of viewpoints as, for example, if we go to say external three dash two, the viewpoints tab has a number of viewpoint properties.
And one of them that's easiest to see is the FOV or the field of view. This changes the vision and the lower the degree, the narrower the comb and the less that we can see. If you increase the angle, then of course your view gets much more distorted.
But changing your FOV may be necessary in times when you are say inside of a ceiling and you need to see more. You'll see that there's a little more clipping involved when you get it and increase the angle too much. And of course to save your FOV to a viewpoint, you would simply right click and go to update.
Now when I updated three two, Navisworks applied the properties of not just the camera position and angle, but also the other properties like my FOV. If I go back to 3.3, we'll see that this FOV is back 3.2 changes. Yours is going to read differently because I'm just adjusting the slider, but it will be the degree by which or to which you set.
Some other properties include perspective versus orthographic. As an example, if I go to external five, you can change the perspective orthographic. And this one lost me a little bit.
There we go. You'll see that now it's a parallel projection instead of a perspective projection. And you'll notice that your FOV is now grayed out because there's no longer a cone of vision.
All lines are parallel with each other. If you save this viewpoint, you'll see that the icon for that view is now different from the rest of them. This icon corresponds with the perspective versus orthographic view type.
You may also change the render style for every viewpoint. For external four, we can change the render mode to, say, hidden line, for example, and save this viewpoint. And if we go back to external four, we'll see that we can change straight from hidden line to full render.
This can be useful if you want to save a number of different modes into viewpoints as sort of a jumping off point. If we were to, say, name this one hidden line, then we'll know that as soon as we select the hidden line view, then our render style will change. And from this render style, we can create other viewpoints.
Other features include sectioning, walk speed, transform color, and other realism options. And we will cover those in future segments. But we definitely need to know the basics of viewpoints to get to the next.
So that includes the basics of viewpoint. Thanks for watching this video, and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you.