Explore the fundamental methods of using the selection tree and appending files in Navisworks Manage. This guide provides a step-by-step process, from file opening to selection and modification of different layers and objects in a model.
Key Insights
- The selection tree in Navisworks Manage is a crucial tool for navigating and modifying different elements in a 3D model. It acts as the mapped representation of objects in the model, enabling users to select and highlight different objects either individually or by layer.
- Navisworks Manage allows for appending multiple files into one workspace. This feature enables users to coordinate and juxtapose different 3D models in the same space. However, these appended files remain as links to their original files and any modifications made within Navisworks will not affect the original files.
- Saving in the native Navisworks format (NWF) maintains the links to the original models, essentially creating a master file that contains a set of instructions rather than actual model information. This file can be used as the primary working file for the project.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, I'll be covering the Selection Tree and also appending files. I'd like you to have Navisworks Manage open, and when you have that open, look at the top of the window.
You'll see that you have an untitled file open. What's happening here is that Navisworks always has to have a file open. Even if you haven't opened one yet, it still actually has a file open.
When it says “untitled, ” that means that this file hasn't been saved yet. So currently we have a file, but nothing is in it, and I can prove that nothing is in it if I go to the Selection Tree. So in your Home tab, in the Select and Search panel, there is a tool called Selection Tree.
Select that button, and you'll see that it turns blue. That means that the tool is open, and if you don't have AutoHide turned off, then make sure that you click that little thumbtack so that it's pointing toward the monitor. So I can tell that nothing is actually in this model because there is nothing in the Selection Tree.
When we start to add things to this model, we'll see the Selection Tree start to get populated. So let's start doing that right now. First thing, we want to open a file and set the file type to All Files.
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You'll do that just by selecting the file type, then navigating to your Lesson 1 folder, open the Bath City folder by double-clicking, and go ahead and open up the Center01.dxf file. You'll see that the screen turns gray, and that's because the model is not in the center of my scene. But I know that something has happened because I see in the Selection Tree that Center01.dxf appears. So I'll hit the corner of my ViewCube to zoom to the extents of my entire model, and of course, I have a model open. If you look at the top of Navisworks, you'll see Center01.dxf is the model that's currently open, and if you expand Center01.dxf, you'll see that you have a number of layers underneath your file.
So everything represented in this Selection Tree is what is in all of the models that you currently have open. If you expand, say, this layer, you'll see that you have a number of different objects, and you can select those objects by selecting the entire layer. You can select each of the objects individually, and as you select them, they get highlighted on screen.
I'll zoom in to make that more apparent, and I can also select these objects from the scene itself. When you select the three-dimensional chimney object, that chimney object also gets selected in the Selection Tree. So you can think of this as the 3D representation for all of your model information, and the tree as the layer or, I suppose, mapped representation of these objects.
You can also select—I'm going to zoom out now—select each of the layers and use the arrow keys to go down the list, and you'll see all of the objects on each different layer. If you select Center01.dxf, it will select the entire file. One of the purposes of Navisworks is to be able to open multiple files at the same time in the same space, and the way that we get that coordination started is by appending files.
So instead of going to Open, which would close this file and open a new one, click the Append button. The Append dialog, which looks an awful lot like the Open dialog box, pops up, and you can navigate to a different file to open. I'm going to select Center02.dxf and hit Open, and you'll see that both in the Selection Tree, Center02 becomes an item, and also on screen we see more objects. If I select the entire Center02 in the Selection Tree, I can see everything that's in Center02.
I can zoom to the extent of that selected object, expand it to see everything in this object, and it remains independent of Center01. It's important to understand that these two files are not original files. These are links to files that exist elsewhere on your hard drive or network.
So any changes that you make to these models within Navisworks will not be reflected in the original files, and that's a good thing. Also, pay attention to the top of your Navisworks Manage window, and you'll see that our file is again called “untitled, ” which means we have not saved this file yet. So let's save this file.
You can do that two ways. In the Quick Launch, you can select Save, and because we have not saved this yet, it will open the Save As dialog. Or you can play it safe and go to the Application button and select Save As, and let's title this bath_city. You'll see the extension is.nwf. NWF is the native Navisworks format, and it's basically just a set of instructions.
It doesn't actually contain any model information. It will maintain these as links, and it will not combine them into this file once we hit Save. There are other formats, which we'll be covering in the future, that allow you to delink your linked files and embed them inside your Navisworks container file. That can be useful for a number of reasons, but any changes made to the linked files won't be updated in your combined or merged file.
So.nwf you can consider to be your master file. This is the one that you'll be working with. So let's hit Save, and at the top you'll see that your file is now called bath_city.nwf, and you can continue to append files.
Select Append again, and I'd like you to navigate down to Center06.dwg, then hold down CTRL and select Center07, Center08, Center09, Center10, Center11, Center12, Center13, Center14, Center15, and Center16. Once you hit Open, all of the files will append at once. You don't have to do this on an individual basis. If you hit the corner of the ViewCube, you'll see that one of the files is at a much different scale than the others.
This file is out of scale, and this happens quite often. There's a way to fix this, and we'll be covering that in the next videos. For now, what we can do is find out which file this is so that we can turn it off, get it out of the way, and fix it later.
One easy way to do that is to select any object that's part of this file. You'll see that on the left-hand side, your Selection Tree opens up something underneath Center15 when you have this rooftop selected, which means that this file is Center15. Because we don't want to deal with this right now, we can select Center15, right-click on it, and then hit Delete.
I know that's a scary word, but this doesn't actually delete the file. What happens is that it deletes the link for the file. So your original Center15 is still alive and well in Windows Explorer.
Now with Center15 gone, you can zoom to the extents and see that your other files seem to be in roughly the correct scale, but one of them again seems to be in the wrong position. We're going to cover this in a future video, but for now, we want to turn it off. Again, let's look at which file this is part of—Center16—and simply delete this.
Now you have a combined city, and you can go through this list with your arrow keys and see all of the different components of that city. If you'd like to deselect anything that you have selected, you can either hit Escape or simply click on empty space. I just clicked out in the distance and it deselected everything that I had selected.
That concludes basic appending of files and using the Selection Tree. In the next videos, we'll be looking at how to fix those little issues that we saw with the drawing scale and the position of the other model. Thanks for watching.