Navisworks Navigation Tools and Temporary Transparency

[Jshaver]

When working on complex buildings I find myself exporting to Navisworks constantly just to navigate through the model and look at specific areas.

It is much quicker to "walk" to the desired location in Navisworks rather than having to create multiple cameras in Revit or cropped 3d views. Now that Autodesk has aquired Navisworks can we hope for similar navigation controls in our BIM software?

The best thing about the navigation tools in Navisworks is that you can go "through" elements and get behind them. In revit regardless of how much you zoom in the object is always in front of you...

A temporary transparent option would also be beneficial. This setting should not affect printing and could be located in the temporary hide/isolate icon. I notice that I am constantly hiding certain elements to see behind, under, or through them. Changing the material to transparent overrides all the elements with the same material and looks confusing. It is also very time consuming to set up different materials for certain elements.

[LRaiz]

Are you making use of Dynamic View Modification tool (F8 )? It has a tab for examining (scroll, zoom, and spin) but for 3d perspective cameras also allows easy interactive walkthroughs and field of view manipulations.

Another continent option is to tile two views on the screen; one for 3d camera and another for a plan view. Then select camera view in a browser and in its content menu click on Show Camera command. You can interactively drag camera eye and target points in plan view and 3d view adjusts appropriately.

[Jshaver]

LRAIZ, Thanks for your reply,

I am currently using each of methods you described. However it is very inefficient and time consuming. The scroll/zoom/spin options never allow you to get behind elements. If you are working in a 3d view and are modifying elements in the center of a building it is very hard to locate specific members. (Without creating crop boxes) I would like to avoid creating cameras, tiling views, manually adjusting camera properties, etc...These methods work fine when simply creating a perspective for rendering or similar but during the modeling process they are clumsy.

After using Navisworks briefly the controls seem far supperior in terms of navigation.
You just point the mouse where you want to go and your there. You can have first or third person views without needing a defined camera, path, or tiled views. I am discovering that I rarely use Revit without an exported navisworks model running in the background just to toggle between the two and use these functions.