Discover how to effectively use the Units in Transform tool in Navisworks to correct model scale and positioning issues. This article specifically addresses correcting such issues in the Bath City model, initially focusing on the issues with appended models, Center 15 and 16.
Key Insights
- The Units in Transform tool allows you to set the drawing unit for each model, ensuring that all models are scaled correctly. This was demonstrated by adjusting the Center 15 model's drawing unit from inches to millimeters.
- With the Units in Transform tool, you can also adjust the origin of each model. This function was crucial in repositioning the misplaced Center 16 model by manually entering a new origin in the X, Y, and Z dimensions.
- Apart from the Units in Transform tool, Navisworks also offers other transform tools for correcting model positioning and scale. These will be explored in subsequent content.
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Welcome back to Navisworks, in this video we'll be covering the Units in Transform tool, and we'll be revisiting the Bath City model that we started to append together. So let's go ahead and find that model, select the open button, and in the Bath City folder underneath Lesson 1, we saved it as bathcity.nwf. Now last time we were in this model, if you recall, we had some problems with a couple of the appended models, Center 15 and 16. One was in the incorrect place, and one was too big.
So in this video we'll be correcting those issues using the Units in Transform tool. So first we actually unloaded those models. I'm going to open up my selection tree.
If you don't have yours open, then in the Home tab under Select and Search Panel, the selection tree button, make that blue, and you'll see your panel pop out. We're going to re-append those Center 15 and 16 models, Center 15.dwg and Center 16.dwg, and if we hit the corner of the view cube we'll see, oh yes, Center 15 is the one that's having all the issues. You can tell it's Center 15 because if I select any object within this model, my selection tree will show me that underneath, well, Center 15 is whatever I have selected.
Now we have something to investigate. So first of all, let's select the Center 15.dwg model in the selection tree, right click, and then go to Units in Transform. So every model has its own drawing unit and its own origin, and the instructions for which drawing units to use are typically saved within the files.
Sometimes they get saved incorrectly or they're used differently from one file to another. So what we're investigating here is to make sure that our model units are set the same between all of the other models. So right now the Units in Transform tell us that the model units for, or the drawing units for, Center 15 are set to inches.
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Cool, that sounds okay. Let's hit cancel, and let's check any one of the other models and see if that corresponds. And in fact it does not.
The other models seem to be drawn as millimeters, so if Center 14 and Center 15 were drawn at the same scale then one would be much larger because one unit equals one inch rather than one millimeter. So no worries, all we have to do is set the Center 15 drawing unit to millimeters and then they will correspond. Once I select that I will see that Center 15 is the correct size corresponding with all of the other models.
So drawing units is one thing that you can change in the Units in Transform dialog box. The other thing fishy about this model is that we have one piece of our city floating up here somewhere. So let's investigate this situation.
It is Center 16, as the blue selection tells me. Right click on Center 16, I can go to Units in Transform, and I'll see that my model units are correctly set to millimeters. My origin is 0,0, 0, and my rotation seems to be okay, and my scale seems to be 1,1, 1. So because the Units in Transform seem to be all correct for this model, we could just hit OK, and we can use a different type of transform, which is to simply assume that the origin is incorrect, and we can use the measure tool to actually make this transformation.
So what we need to do is find two known points, and I'm seeing that this is actually a sort of a puzzle piece that seems to be just in the wrong position, but I can see that this corresponds with this other piece that's much lower than it. It could be a grid line, it could be a level marker. Usually models have indicators of where they should be.
If you go to the Review tab, and in the Measure Split button, select Point to Point, and you can just get close to the vertex here, and then the corresponding vertex here, and we can tell Navisworks to move this thing from here to here by selecting the Center 16, and then in the Measure panel, selecting the Flyout, and select Transform Selected Items. I'm going to hit Escape to deselect that Center 16, and now our model is nicely in place where it should be. If we investigate the Units in Transform, we'll see that at the origin we've changed to, this is X, Y, and Z, to negative three inches, or three and seven eighths inches.
If we actually knew this dimension from the start, we can simply type it in. So I'm going to undo that transform. I'm going back a number of views.
There we go. And if we in fact know that it's off by three and seven eighths inches, I can right click on Center 16, and then type that in here. So in Z, negative zero feet, three inches, seven eighths, and it looks like the reason why there's a small gap here is simply because we're rounding to the nearest eighth inch.
We can simply use Measure to fix that issue, and then it looks like this model is now locked in place. And that concludes the basics of the Units in Transform tool. There are other transform tools in Navisworks, and we'll be getting into those.
This one is mostly used as a correction to a position or scale of a model that you placed. So thank you for watching, and I will see you in the next video.