Navigation Options
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I sometimes find navigation to be a bit of a challenge. As an example, I am working on a model of a small house. I have constructed the rooms and walls, added some color texture to walls, added some textures to the floors and inserted a couple of doors. Now I want to put baseboards throughout the house. I have accomplished it in a couple of areas but I find that at times it is very challenging to rotate around so that I can draw lines where I intend to add the baseboard using the Follow Me tool. I find that I am doing a lot of orbiting, zooming and just down right struggling at times to both draw the lines and then select them so I can use the Follow Me to draw the baseboards (hope all of that is understandable).
I have looked through the extensions/plugins and do not see anything that looks like it would make the navigation around the interior of the model any easier. I have experimented somewhat with the Walk and Look Around tools but that seems difficult and time consuming as well. Thought some of you may know or have some good tips for navigating around in the interior of a model.
I was watching a video were someone was using the 3D Connections navigation tool and it looked like they had much better control and navigation capabilities than what I have with my mouse. Again, just wondering if there are some tricks/tips that would make the job easier.
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The first things that came to mind are that there are some possible changes to your model and process that might help. Neither of these answer your question about the 3D Connexion devices. I've tried the Space Navigator and decided the standard 3-button mouse works better for me. Other's like additional devices for navigating.
First, If you separate the floor, walls ceilings and roof onto separate layers, you could get some of those things out of your way to make it easier to work on the others. Maybe if you had a floor plan component or group that was separate from the walls you could use those lines for things like the Follow Me operations for baseboards and crown moldings if they exist.
Second, instead of drawing (tracing) lines to use as the path, consider selecting them out of the floor plan or off the bottoms of the walls, copying them and then using Edit>Paste in place to put the path lines in the same context as the molding profile. Using some easy select techniques can reduce the amount of navigating you have to do.
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Yes, I thought of those things as well. Since I am still on the first floor, I also though of temporarily reducing the height of the walls to make it easier to perform the trace function.
Seems like this is a common situation that could/should be addressed. I do not think I could write a ruby script to try to come up with some type of plugin though.
When I see all of the neat stuff that people have done, I posted this because I thought I might trigger some of you programmers to come up with a way to do tackle this. Again, I am sure this is a common problem (particularly for people who model buildings) and wanted to see if someone had, or could build, some neat way to address this situation. It would seem to me that there are many situations where users need to address the ability to navigate "inside" of a model.
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Although i'm mostly not drawing buildings I frequently work inside models to add details. I use the methods I suggested and a few others to make it easier to work inside. I don't do it but you can also set up components and groups to be hidden while editing a component or group. I usually want the other components in my model for reference so I leave them turned on but some folks like them to go away.
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I've also struggled with this in the past but as Dave says using layers is a major help. I design kitchens so the wall are always 'in the way' but you need them for reference. I now set up scenes with different layers turned off for placing mouldings etc. such as a birds eye view with the ceiling layer turned off.
I also use Profile Builder(Pro version) a lot as you can lock the the axes/direction as you place runs of moulding- easier than drawing lines and using follow me tool
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