This article provides a detailed guide on how to use animator to create a section plane in the Anavisworks series. The focus is on setting up for using the Scripter tool effectively, detailing the steps to create a new scene and editing a section plane.
Key Insights
- The article begins with the creation of a new scene in the BIM 360 model using the animator, to be used in conjunction with the next tool, Scripter.
- The process involves selecting the 'add scene' button, naming the new scene as 'cut', adding a section plane, and enabling sectioning. The section plane's initial position is set outside of the building and then moved into the building.
- The article also explains how to toggle the view of grid lines, which are useful for clash detection but may be unnecessary when creating a section plane. The final section plane can be isolated or have a camera within the scene, depending on the requirements of the Scripter tool.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, I'll be covering some more Animator, and specifically how to use Animator to make a section plane for use in the next tool coming up, which is called Scripter. We'll be doing something that looks a little bit like this by making a new scene and then editing a section plane.
And we're doing this simply to get a setup for the next tool coming up. We'll be starting with the BIM 360 model that's in your Lesson 3 folder. And so far, we have an entire animation scene, and we will be creating a new scene that is parallel with this one.
So let's select the Add Scene button, which is the green plus, and then go to Add Scene. And this one we're going to call "Cut." Next, you want to select your Cut scene and then go to Add Section Plane.
It is a section plane—we'll call this one "Front." Make that section plane active, and then go up to the Viewpoint tab and select Enable Sectioning. I'm going to hit the Home button so I have a good view of the front.
The first thing we need to do is to set an initial position for this section plane. If we select the Move button in the contextual tab Sectioning Tools, then our gizmo will pop up and we can move this to an initial position which is outside of the building. And let's capture this keyframe.
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Next, let's move the scrubber a little bit and then move the gizmo into the building a few feet. And we'll capture this keyframe. You'll see that the section plane is actually showing a red interstitial.
I believe this is called an interpolation. And of course, with your initial animation set, we can try out this cut—this section plane cut. First, let's turn off the gizmo, then rewind it and hit Play.
Looks good. Now, if you notice, the animation that was playing was actually the one that I had selected. If you still want to see your other animation, you can do that instead. All you have to do is select the animation scene first.
One more thing I should mention—the grid lines are turned on right now, and that's good for things like Clash Detection and for just walking around the building. But for right now, I don't want to see them—and you may not want to see them either. To turn them off, you can simply toggle them in the View tab by selecting the Show Grid button. It will turn them off if you just want to see the building itself and nothing else.
But that's all there is to making a section plane. You can have a camera within your section plane scene, but if you just want to have the section plane isolated—which is what we want for the Scripter tool—then this is the simple way to do it. So in the next video, we'll be talking about Scripter and how to automate your animations, as well as a couple of other events that you may be able to use for the Timeliner.
So I'll see you in the next video.