Introducing Navisworks Scripter: Automate Actions for a Four-Dimensional Model

Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be introducing the Navisworks Scripter tool. The Scripter tool is a sort of automation tool that allows you to automate some actions by applying true conditions to events, and it works alongside Animator as well as Timeliner to make a more complete four-dimensional model.

If I had the scripts enabled, I have some scripts set up already, and if I select a key on my keyboard then I can open up the right door. If I select another key on my keyboard I can open up another door, and then I can close them both together by selecting a third key on my keyboard. This is all possible because I have applied some events to some of the animations that we've already started to make.

For this video I'd like to go over the Scripter panel itself. If you want to activate the Scripter panel and follow along, you can select the Animation tab and then in the Script panel make the Scripter tool blue. Toggle it on essentially.

Don't enable scripts yet because once we enable scripts it locks down the panel. Now you shouldn't have anything in your scripts area yet. I had some just to demonstrate these things, and these are the scripts that are actually making the right door open and the left door open and the doors close, but you'll be starting out with nothing like this.

So on the left-hand side you have the scripts area. You can expand each of these areas to see more, and this is a lot like the Animator tool that allows you to add scenes and animation sets. The Scripter allows you to add scripts, and then you can add folders to house those scripts if they're related to each other, and if you want to organize them better.

The second section is the events section, and events are essentially conditions that need to be true in order for actions to occur. We'll be defining what needs to be happening in the model up here in order for whatever we define as the thing to occur when these events are true down here. The buttons on the bottom of the events section are the types of events that you can create, and these are very simple to create.

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They've really done a good job of not making you do much coding or any coding, but I'm going to run through some of the events that we can use to create conditions. The first one is On Start. Now this one occurs when you start to enable scripts or when you open up a model that has scripts enabled and has some scripts.

The second one is a timer event, and this is sort of like a stopwatch. It'll count down, and once it gets to a specific position, rather a specific time, then the action will occur. The third one is the one that I was using for the door open and door close events, and that's On Key Press.

So I set some keys on my keyboard. The next one is On Collision, and that's when my camera collides with some defined sets of elements that I've selected. And the fourth one, or sorry, the fifth one, On Hotspot, is a very interesting one, and we will be using this On Hotspot event.

It creates an invisible sphere around a selected area, and if we enter that area, then it will trigger an action, and then we can set it to trigger another action when we leave that sphere. We will not be exploring On Variable. It's a much more advanced feature, but essentially it allows you to put together a formula, like if specific dimensions in your model are true, and it's, yeah, that's just way too advanced for this course.

The last one on the list is On Animation, and this will occur when we've started an animation, when we hit play, or when Scripter has triggered another animation as an action. Once we've set all the events, then we can go down to the actions, and we have a few actions that we can use. The one primarily that we will be using is On Animation, so we can play and stop an animation as an action, and we'll be making animations to play them.

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There is a Show Viewpoint action, so we can have an event be true, and then our camera can go straight to one of these viewpoints that we have preset. We can pause an animation, and the difference between pause and stop is that we can have Navisworks continue with the animation after a preset period of time. We can have Navisworks send us a pop-up message with Send Message that can say anything that we want.

We can set a variable, which is sort of tied to this other event variable, but these can be worked in together, and we can also have Navisworks load a model in when some event is true. For example, if we get to the end of an animation, then we can have another building get loaded into our model, and then we might be able to continue that animation with the Load Model action. If you want to start a section plane or change the visibility in your model via the Scripter, then you can do that with this Show Viewpoint button.

If you remember, we can save styles like this Override Style versus a Full Render Style, and if we want to start presenting our model as a Full Render and then have Scripter automatically change it, then the Show Viewpoint action is going to be the one that we would use in that case. We can set multiple actions to take place on single events, or we can have multiple events required for either a single or multiple actions to take place. We'll get started creating some scripts in our next video, and I will see you in the next videos.

Thank you.