From the course: Navisworks Essential Training 2023

The Selection Tree - Navisworks Tutorial

From the course: Navisworks Essential Training 2023

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The Selection Tree

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- [Instructor] Look at the selection tree as our own private little Windows Explorer. This is where every element in the entire model is stored. You may already know that the selection tree can help us navigate through the model and allow us to zoom in on specific elements. This tree looks different between an NWD and an NWF file, and we'll look at the specific differences between the two. The objective of this video is to explain how the selection tree works and what the differences are between an NWD and an NWF file. To begin with, let's open up Navisworks. Let's go open. Let's grab NavisworksEssentialNWD. Make sure your selection tree is selected by clicking Selection Tree here. And if it's a tab, that's fine, you can just hover over it. I like to keep mine out like this. Notice this says NavisworksEssentialNWD and we drill into that, all of our NWC models are embedded into this NWD. Remember that when we opened our NWF model. So with the selection sheet expanded, notice that we can drill into each of these as well. Just because it's an NWD model, that doesn't mean we can't access the properties of each item. It starts from the top, so when I select Architectural NWC, that's everything. If we right click notice, we can override that entire item. Like for example, we can override the transparency, we can make just the architectural shell transparent. Hit escape, and it looks into everything. To view it as transparent, we go to the viewpoint tab. For the mode, we'll go shaded. A lot of times, that's why people like to have a shaded model. So now we can see all of our elements inside of here, with the architectural model kind of ghosted into the background. Let's change our mode, however, back to full render. Notice that when we drill into architectural NWC, there will be items that aren't really hosted to any specific level. We can select those. Or if we drill into first floor, notice that it selects the items down on the first floor. It doesn't always grab the walls like that, but if we drill into first floor, notice that we have ceilings, drill into compound ceilings, gypsum board and really drill into exactly what these items are. The same thing holds true for, say, mechanical. So if we go into mechanical NWC, notice, we select it, top layer, drill into mechanical, maybe go into first floor, drill into that. Say for example, we want to find pipe accessories, hold down the control key, pipe fittings and pipes. I guess we'll add plumbing fixtures to it. Now, if we go to our home tab and go to hide unselected, hit escape a couple times. Now, if we pan into here and look, here's a lot of our piping systems, at least for the first floor. These items must be hosted to a floor above it. So that's pretty cool. Looking at this, let's look at the difference between an NWD and an NWF. Go to open. Let's find NavisworksEssentialNWF and click open. No, let's not save our changes to NWD. Sometimes in a material, it'll miss a bit map or a jpeg. That's okay, just click ignore all. Notice this takes a second longer to open because look everything in here is independent. There's no one master model. But when we drill into these items, notice that we can see them based on their elements. When I exported this model, I didn't export it per level, so you can kind of see how that breaks down. It's up to you if you want to have your tree broken down per level or just per by component. In our selection tree, we can switch it to compact like we've done before. Electrical does have levels or it can change it to our properties which really drills us into some specific properties. I generally keep it on standard. So that's the selection tree in a nutshell.

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